


Helioneiros

by aeli_kindara



Series: Supernatural Codas [13]
Category: Supernatural, Wayward Sisters (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Case Fic, Donna's Cabin, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Miscommunication, POV Alternating, Pining, Season/Series 14, Team Free Will 2.0, suicide cw is case-related (no major characters), the little 14.06 coda that could
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-24 09:08:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17097698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: In which Dean visits his mother, and Claire takes Cas on a hunt.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and happy hellatus, everybody!
> 
> I got you a coda. At least, it was supposed to be a coda, back when I started it after 14.06. Now it is... a chaptered fic. The complete draft is 24k, though I'm still poking at some latter bits; I plan to post a chapter a day over the coming week.
> 
> Most of this story takes place over the gap between 14.05 and 14.06, but it continues up into the events of 14.07 with spoilers through 14.09. 
> 
> The Greek portmanteau _helioneiros_ is one I made up to mean, roughly, _a dream of the sun_.

The turnoff to Donna’s cabin is marked by a pink plastic flamingo, faded and frost-heaved and leaning over against the mailbox. The gravel is rutted and potholed, but the Impala rolls comfortably over each obstacle, around the bend, to the house.

Yellow walls, a mossy roof, windowpanes of that slightly distorted old glass, the kind that bears the weight of its years. Two large tree stumps beside the front door, a garden gnome nestled between their roots.

 _Honestly, I’m grateful to have someone out there,_ says Donna’s voice in Dean’s mind. _Dad loved that place, but neither Jimmy or I was quite ready to take it on, after he had his stroke. I keep getting calls from the neighbors about a branch that’s about to fall or a raccoon under the porch — did you know they can open trash bins?_

Dean just looks at it, for a minute, before he shifts into park.

He has a week’s worth of groceries in sagging plastic bags in the backseat. Beer cold in the cooler. A pizza he picked up in the last town, still hot, and filling the cab with the mouth-watering smell of melted cheese. It’s from a tiny local place, no seating, just a little bench against the wall for customers to wait for their pie. He’d felt too big for it, wood slats digging into his thighs. He’d sat there for a while with his thumbs hovering over the screen of his phone before finally texting Mom: _Be there in 30. Hope you’re hungry for pizza._

Service at the cabin is spotty, he knows. There’s a landline for important calls. But her answer had come back barely an instant later: _Always._

Thing is — Dean knows he’s being managed.

Sam doesn’t want him barricading himself in his room or climbing the bunker’s walls. Sam wants a little headspace for himself, probably, which is fair; he’s still doing laps around Dean, keeping about a million balls in the air. Since the thing with Maggie, that includes ensuring hunters actually follow the new hunt-with-a-buddy edict; it includes earnest conversations and check-ins about their workload, how they’re adjusting, if there’s anything they need.

No one’s immune. Not even Dean. So here he is: on a mission to bring Mom and Bobby groceries they could have bought for themselves, and probably a kill-three-birds-with-one-stone mental wellness check that he won’t be the only one reporting back on.

He wishes Cas were here.

It’s a stupid thought. There’s no reason Cas _should_ be here; it would probably be awkward if he were. It would probably be — hilarious, honestly, a little bubble of non-sequitur joy wells up in his chest at the thought of Cas inspecting the garden gnome, frowning; it would be — Dean doesn’t know. He just — he could use a good laugh. He thinks of introducing Cas to prostitutes and hunting and cowboy movies and lost causes. He thinks of Cas offering to go with him, to face Amara, as the sun bled dry.

A weekend visit to Dean’s mom and her maybe-boyfriend in their new lakeside love shack is not as daunting as trying to blow up God’s sister, he thinks. Probably.

But Cas is in Sioux Falls for some quality time with Claire, continuing his unlikely campaign for Surrogate Dad of the Year. If he weren’t, he’d be hunting with Jack, like he always is. Dean could invite himself along on one of those trips, he guesses; sometimes he experiments with working himself up to ask. But they just keep missing each other. He’ll be off with Sam when Cas and Jack finish a hunt, and by the time he gets home, they’ll have disappeared on another one.

Cas says the kid’s doing good. Dean’s barely seen either of them since he got back.

Maybe Cas is staying away on purpose. Maybe he saw things in Dean’s mind he doesn’t want to be within a hundred miles of; maybe he saw whatever it was that made the djinn stagger back, terrified, while Dean drowned, and drowned, and drowned —

The screen door squeals on its hinges. Dean’s eyes refocus. Mom’s smiling, pulling her coat tight around her shoulders against the November chill, coming down the steps.

Dean cuts Baby’s engine. His knee creaks like the door does as he unfolds himself out of it — he can’t shake off seven hours behind the wheel like he used to. Mom pulls him into a hug.

“It was so good of you to come,” she says, drawing back. Her eyes are shining with her smile. “Bobby’s around back. Can I carry things?”

\---

When Castiel arrives at Jody’s house in Sioux Falls, no one answers his knock.

 _Claire should be home, but the rest of us might be out,_ Jody’s text had said. _You know what to do._

Castiel peers in the windowpane, and sees an empty living room. He retreats down the steps to find the old dog toy hidden under the bush — a familiar routine by now; he’s been making these visits for nearly a year — and retrieve the spare key.

Sure enough, once he gets the door open, he can hear her music. Loud, shivery, and headlong, lacking the familiar melodies and chord structures he’s come to associate with Dean’s. “Claire?” he calls, but there’s no answer, so he returns the key, wipes his shoes on the mat, and follows the sound of it up the stairs.

The door of her bedroom is half-open, but Castiel knocks anyway. “Come in!” Claire yells, and a moment later the music cuts off abruptly and she turns on her heel to face him, curls swinging.

“Good, you’re here.” She’s holding hangers up to each of her shoulders, a crisp pantsuit to one, sensible sweater and soft chinos at the other. “What do you think — feds or grief counselors?”

Castiel blinks. His face is reflected in the mirror on Claire’s closet door, hovering over her shoulder. It looks tired and a little alarmed.

He says, “I don’t understand.”

“Feds or grief counselors. To visit the victim’s family?” Claire waits a beat, then sighs, hands dropping to her sides. The fabric of her pantsuit swishes gently against the duvet, the sleeve of the blazer catching to hang over the corner of her bed. “Jody didn’t tell you. There’s a case.”

Castiel hesitates. He doesn’t take it for granted, these visits; Jody was clear enough on that when she first invited him to come. _You know I’m not so sure about a kid like Claire seeing her dad’s face on someone who —_

 _Who destroyed her family and any chance she had at a normal life,_ Castiel had offered, with a heavy heart.

Jody had paused, thoughtful. _I wasn’t going to be_ quite _that blunt, but yes._

 _I understand,_ Castiel had said, quickly. _I won’t bother —_

But Jody had cut him off. _No,_ she’d said. _That’s actually — that’s not why I’m calling. I think I might’ve been wrong. Claire cares about you, and there’s few enough people you could get her to admit that about; you clearly care about her. And I keep thinking, if you hadn’t come back, and I was the one that kept her from having a relationship with her —_

She’d stopped short of saying _dad._

Castiel is not Claire’s father. But he’s not Jack’s father, either, and he’s starting to admit to himself that he’s better at the job than he thought.

He crosses his arms, and tries to look kind but stern. “Does Jody want you to be working this case?”

Claire’s face spasms briefly toward pride, or disdain; then she looks down at the toes of her boots. “Jody says she trusts my judgment. She offered to help, but she’s still in a cast. I don’t want —”

She stops talking, but Castiel understands.

Claire doesn’t want Jody to get hurt.

“Patience said she’d come with me, too,” Claire adds, more quietly, “but she’s not — she’s not a _hunter._ Not like us.”

Castiel looks down at his hand where it rests in the crook of his elbow. His knuckles are chapped. Crossed arms; a strange human habit. They’re meant to indicate that one is serious, confident, in charge. It feels to Castiel more like he’s hugging himself in defense.

 _Feds or grief counselors._ She’s still gathering information. She isn’t even going after the monster, whatever it is. Not directly, not yet.

“There was a time,” he says, carefully, “when you wouldn’t have wanted backup.”

Claire’s eyes slide over his face. There’s a soft curl to her lips, sharp and vulnerable, that reminds him abruptly of Dean.  “Yeah, well. When you start worrying about risking other people’s lives, it occurs to you that maybe you shouldn’t risk your own, either.”

The confession hangs in the air between them. Claire’s shoulders are high and rigid.

Castiel unfolds his arms. “What’s the case?”

Her eyes dart swiftly to his. Hesitate, fix there.

She wears less makeup than she used to. Castiel remembers those eyes staring up at him out of panda-rings of black eyeliner, that mouth scoffing, those shoulders shrugging off his concern. Humans, he thinks, change _fast._

“People are having dreams of other worlds,” she says, after a long beat of silence. “And then they’re ending up dead.”

Understanding effervesces under Castiel’s skin. “You think a dreamwalker might be involved.”

Claire looks away again. She nods, tightly. Her arms are crossed, now, and Castiel thinks he’s right; it doesn’t make her look self-assured. Castiel finds Claire Novak more intimidating than he does just about anyone, but she doesn’t look it now. She looks young, and a little bit scared.

Castiel says, “You think it might be Kaia.”

\---

The kitchen table is small and cramped, wedged between the counter and a wall that’s almost entirely windows. They look out on the lake in the fading light. Pine trees roll their shoulders against the wind; the water ripples. The moon is up, and a loon is calling somewhere, eerie and laughing in the growing dark.

Dean levers himself into one of the hoop-back chairs, almost too large for the small space. He lets Mom fill his plate with pizza, and misses the immensity of the table at the bunker, the familiar hidden holster at his right hand. He watches Bobby out of the corner of his eye, uneasy domesticity in the set of his injured shoulder, back to the door.

If he had to, Dean could bust out of here through one of the windows. He doesn’t like feeling trapped, confined. He doesn’t necessarily like his back to the door, either, but Bobby has the right of it, here — everything’s too cramped. Freedom of motion is more important than sight lines. Sight lines are a challenge anyway, with all these windows, two doors.

Dean limits himself to three slices of pizza. He accepts the offered beer, and looks away as Bobby maneuvers himself to the fridge and back, juggling three bottles with his sling. He tells them about his latest hunt, and how Jack’s doing, and fields Mom’s questions about Sam the best he can.

They give him the tour after dinner is done. It’s not much: a long living room, minimalist kitchen, two bedrooms, one little bathroom with hot water Mom swears is working again. She and Bobby are in the room with a big queen bed and gunmetal gleaming from the top of the dresser. Dean’s in the other: three beds, two of them bunked. A house built for kids to come visit. He deposits his duffel and tries to guess whether his feet will stick out over the footboard. The bedspread’s a blue that makes him think of Cas’s eyes.

“There are board games,” says Mom, “and some jigsaw puzzles, I think.”

Dean doesn’t want to play _Sorry!_ , and no one thinks _Twister_ is a good idea. So they wind up dumping out five hundred pieces of faded stained glass window on the kitchen table: the Chartres cathedral, says the box. It has scuffed corners and advertises its contents in a rounded font with elaborate serifs. The picture on the front shows a circular window like a rose. Miniature scenes spread like petals from its center: a mother with her child. An angel with wings and a harp. Men writing, men judging. Men praying.

They actually make a decent team, the three of them. Mom works on the borders. Bobby starts piecing together the abstract patterns: yellow fleur-de-lis symbols on a blue field, red and blue latticework with dots of white. Dean hunts down faces, folds of colorful clothing, wings.

It’s more than half done by the time they break for bed. Mom puts her hand on Dean’s shoulder and says, “You’ll have to stay long enough to help us finish it, in the morning.”

Dean wonders, testing his toes against the wire of the bedframe, staring up at the still ceiling fan in the sparse light of the moon, if this is what family is supposed to feel like. If these borrowed trappings are the things he missed; if Mom spent her childhood doing jigsaw puzzles with _her_ mother, if she ever went on a vacation to a lake.

The waves are slapping gently at the timbers of the dock. The wind rattles the storm windows.

He’s never had family that wasn’t all-consuming. Critical. He’s never had family that wasn’t the only goddamn thing he had in the world.

It’s a funny thing, this type of — loneliness isn’t quite the right word. But it is, too; loneliness in the midst of togetherness. He feels like a foreign, floating thing. He feels like he couldn’t float if he didn’t have this particular sea around him, this particular calm.

His phone is wavering between one and two bars of service. Dean squints at the sudden brightness of the screen, and taps in: _You ever try a jigsaw puzzle? I feel like you’d like them. How’s Claire?_

The “Sending” bar progresses slowly across the screen. Hovers.

Dean falls asleep before he can see whether it fails or succeeds.

\---

“Melissa Kaur,” says Claire, shoving a messy sheaf of paper into Castiel’s hands. “Victim number two’s younger sister.”

They’re on their way to Garretson, South Dakota, half an hour outside Sioux Falls — where both the victims were found. The question she’s answering is _who are we going to speak with._ The question Castiel doesn’t quite know how to ask is _what got you onto this, where’s the dreamwalker connection, why._

Maybe Claire’s case files will hold the answer. He unfolds them with some trepidation. There’s a dark red smear by his thumb that might be ketchup and might be blood.

Claire glances over at the article at the top of the stack, taking her eyes off the road long enough for the semi in the oncoming lane to blare its horn until she corrects onto a straight course. “See, there’s the first vic,” she says, blithely, tapping the page before reaching for the candy bar she’s got nestled against the gearshift. “Miles Harlow, forty-six years old. Army vet.”

Castiel scans the page. “It says here that he died of apparent suicide, at Palisades State Park. They found his body in the river.”

“Still waiting on the coroner’s report,” Claire qualifies. “I was thinking we could go to the morgue tomorrow.”

Castiel nods absently, skimming the article. A paragraph near the bottom jumps out.

_“He was telling me just today about this dream he had last night,” says Rod Davies, Harlow’s long-time friend, who served with him in Afghanistan. “Said he saw Heaven, and our buddy Ed there waiting for him. Just gotta hope he made it okay. Gotta hope he’s there now.”_

“I talked to Davies already, on the phone,” says Claire, darting another look at the page, squirming with impatience. Castiel thinks of Jack. “And so — get this. He told me Miles gave him a detailed description of this dream he had — this garden paradise. Super vivid, he said. Almost more like a vision than a dream.”

Castiel frowns. It doesn’t seem like all that much to go on. “And victim number two?”

Claire waves her hand at the stack of papers, and he turns the top one over. The next sheet is a messy print-out of ads that ran over from the first page. He leafs past that one, too, and finds a woman’s face staring up at him: arched eyebrows, small smile, pink scarf draped elegantly over her hair. _Irene Kaur,_ reads the caption.

It’s the same story. Palisades State Park, apparent suicide. Only five days apart.

“Nineteen years old, popular local kid, high school valedictorian. Home on break from the University of Wisconsin. Lots of friends,” Claire says, flapping her hand again at the page. “No one thought she’d be the type, yada yada.” _A tragic shock,_ says the text, and _can’t believe_ , and _celebrating Thanksgiving break with her friends the night before._

“There’s nothing about unusual dreams in this,” Castiel points out, and Claire smiles, sharp.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” she says, and nods at the sign for Garretson, and swings the wheel hard right.

\---

The Kaur sisters’ mother is on the phone when they walk in. Her face looks tired, hair limp, and she nods to them and raises a hand in greeting when Melissa lets them in the door. Then she turns away and says, in a strained voice, “So — if we go with cremation —”

Melissa Kaur blinks at them, and offers a pretty smile that falters almost immediately. She has a mouth, Castiel thinks, that is used to smiling; that doesn’t know what to do when smiling isn’t the task at hand. “I don’t want to bother Mom,” she tells them, in a low voice; “you could come upstairs to my room?”

The house smells faintly of cinnamon. The stairs creak under their feet. Castiel slides his hand up the old, much-scuffed railing and wonders if children slid down it, in happier days.

Melissa’s bedroom is lined with quilts.

There are several layers on her bed, rich medleys of fabric, purples and greens and blues. More on the walls. A sewing machine sits on the desk in the corner of the room, clearly much used. The chair next to it is piled with material.

Claire files in after her, so Castiel follows, keeping his hands clasped in front of him, trying not to loom awkwardly in the door. Melissa turns and sits at the foot of the bed, smoothing her hands over her pleated skirt, and glances between them with a nervous look on her face.

“I — appreciate you coming all this way,” she says, uncomfortably, fingers reaching to brush a loose square of sea-green fabric hanging over the back of her chair. “I, honestly didn’t know the school district did this kind of thing.”

“Well, with the break coming up,” says Claire, with a kindness Castiel thinks might be a little exaggerated, though he’s never had much of an eye for these things. “They wanted to make sure you have the resources you need to cope with this terrible loss.”

“Avoid copycats, you mean,” Melissa mutters. Then she straightens, suddenly, as if remembering herself. There’s a flush on her cheeks, bright against her dark hair. “I’m sorry. I’m not — I’m no kind of risk like that, I swear. I just — I mean, we have school tomorrow. You could’ve waited. And it’s not like my mom isn’t taking care of things.”

Claire glances at Castiel for backup. Castiel says, in his most professional tones, “Still. We want to make sure you have all the help you need. This is our job, after all.”

He leans forward to place his hand over Melissa’s in what he thinks should be a comforting gesture. She glances down at it, then back up at his face. After a moment, he withdraws.

“Right, uh,” she says. “So — what do you want to know?”

“We’re here for you to talk about anything on your mind,” Claire takes over smoothly. “It can be difficult, processing something like this. What was Irene like? How are you responding to this weekend’s events? Are you sleeping, are you having dreams? There are no wrong answers.”

Melissa laughs, breathily, turning her face aside. In profile, her nose is long and aquiline. “Funny you should mention dreams. Irene said she had a really vivid one, Friday night. She was telling me about it just — yesterday _._ ”

Her incredulity at the passage of time is palpable. Claire shoots a look at Castiel as if to say, _See, I told you._

Castiel asks, “What was the dream about?”

Melissa hesitates. Her eyes stay on the bedpost for a moment, then slide up to Castiel’s, then Claire’s, then beyond to a spot on the wall.

“Anything you tell us is confidential,” Claire assures her.

This girl with her quilts looks far older than sixteen, Castiel thinks. He hasn’t always been able to guess humans’ ages by the lines around their eyes.

“It’s just — it was about Cleo,” says Melissa Kaur. Then, glancing between them, a queasy line of worry between her eyebrows, “Her — girlfriend? That she didn’t want Mom to know about. Her girlfriend who _died._ ”

\---

When Irene Kaur was seventeen years old, and beginning her junior year of high school, she fell madly in love with a senior.

The story unfolds out of Melissa like a storybook, like something she’s learned by rote. Cleo played the starring role in all the school plays; she loved physics class; she dreamed of becoming an astronaut. She bought Irene her first Vonnegut novel, and took her all the way to New York for her first Broadway musical. She snuck out with her to the hotel rooftop, after their parents had gone to bed, and kissed her there, for the first time, under snowflakes and stars.

“You’d think they shared a soul,” Melissa says. They’re in Irene’s room, now, which feels like a shrine: playbills and bookshelves, a broken old lava lamp, a _Dark Side of the Moon_ poster behind the door. An incongruous stuffed animal is arranged lovingly against the pillows; Castiel can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a dalmatian or a cow. “They were talking about going to college together — Irene was a year behind, but they were both in love with southern California. She thought she might want to go into the film industry. And then Cleo got into Caltech, and then she left, and then —”

She breaks off. Squares her shoulders.

“She died,” she says, voice rough with bravery. “In a car accident. The taxi was taking her from the airport to campus. She never even made it there. Irene was — I mean.”

“She wasn’t Irene,” Claire says softly, and Melissa gives her a piercing look, then nods.

“It’s hard to believe she’d do this,” she says, softly. “I mean, _now,_ after everything she’s fought through. It’s been two years. She’s — not _okay,_ I guess, she’ll never — was never — going to be _okay,_ but. She had such good people around her, here and at school both, and Mom’s been so good about it, even though she never knew, and I just — I don’t get it.” She laughs, self-consciously. “I guess this is where you tell me that we can never truly understand death but there’s comfort in remembering or whatever.”

Castiel glances at Claire. He asks, “Did she seem distraught? When she told you about the dream?”

Melissa looks up. Her eyes are shining, for the first time, with a hint of unshed tears.

“No,” she says. “No, she seemed — happy. Thoughtful. It wasn’t until —”

She stops. Swallows.

“You can tell us,” says Claire, gently. “Anything.”

Melissa’s eyes dart between their faces, then up to the ceiling. There’s a quilt in here, too, Castiel realizes for the first time, hanging over them like a starry sky. It’s a night-sea of animals, resolving from abstract patterns. A fish swims through a river of light. A gazelle leaps between the bars of a tiger’s stripes.

“She got a phone call,” says Melissa, steadily, gaze still fixed above her. “You’ll think I’m crazy, or she was, but — I was _there_ when she answered it. It wasn’t a dream.”

A beat passes, another. “Who was it?” Castiel asks.

Melissa doesn’t move as she answers, in a steady voice, “She said it was from Cleo. Asking her to meet.”


	2. Chapter 2

There’s weight crushing down on Dean’s lungs.

It presses into his nostrils, his ears, his mouth. Fills his skull, runs needles of fire through the insides of his bones. His ribs can’t take this; they’re going to crack. His blood is going to boil and turn poisonous, like they say happens to divers who rise to the surface too quickly. He’s going to open his mouth and let it in and let it in and let it in —

He sits up gasping, his own cry loud in his ears, eyes straining to glean something real from the dark of the night.

The room resolves itself slowly. Donna’s cabin; Mom and Bobby are in the next room. He hopes he didn’t wake them. He hopes the walls here aren’t too thin.

The mattress feels thin and hard where it didn’t before. The blankets feel too meager a barrier between him and the night. Dean lies down and pulls them up, again, to his chin. He turns on his side.

He closes his eyes and wills himself to sleep. Just sleep.

\---

Melissa sees them to the front gate, and stands there watching as Claire’s car pulls away.

There wasn’t much more to learn, between the phone call and the dream. Details established, Castiel had watched Claire fumble through something that sounded like a rehearsed grief counseling script, and added some vaguely comforting words when she was done. He’s not sure either of them actually helped — Melissa looks pretty skeptical — but he doesn’t think they _hurt,_ so at least there’s that.

Castiel swivels in his seat to retrieve the case files, noticing all over again that the upholstery smells strongly of French fries. He peruses the pages momentarily before setting them down again.

He tries to frame what he wants to say.

“I thought Kaia only went to the Bad Place, in her dreams,” he ventures, after a minute or more of consideration. “Are you sure this is dreamwalker-related?”

Claire doesn’t look at him as she turns the wheel back onto the highway for Sioux Falls. There’s a stubborn set to her lower lip. “It has to be.”

Castiel hesitates, then presses on. “Even if it is, there a lot of things that can dreamwalk. I used to be able to, before I lost my wings. There are monsters — djinn — that manipulate dreams; Sam and Dean just fought one that —”

“I don’t care,” Claire bursts out. “I _don’t care._ Okay? Just — shut up, for one second.”

Castiel opens his mouth to reply, before her words catch up with him. He closes it again.

A mile marker passes. The sun is already setting; they’re headed for an early dinner at Jody’s before returning to the bar where Irene was drinking the night before she disappeared.

“Besides.” Claire’s voice has regained a little of its nonchalance. “Derek Swan didn’t just go to one place. He had paintings of all different worlds; I looked at the crime scene photos. Dark Kaia could have planted one of those — one of the good ones, I mean — in the victims’ heads, and then —”

She breaks off. Castiel bites his tongue. It makes no sense; none of the theory hangs together.

“What do you _want_ to be true?” he asks, as gently as he can, and Claire keeps driving and doesn’t give him an answer.

\---

Patience is in the kitchen with Jody when they get home, working on a kale side to go with the barbecue chicken in the slow cooker. She waves at both of them, and offers Castiel a shy little smile of greeting, and Jody sets down a pan of what looks like cornbread and comes to hug him with her oven mitts on.

“Thank you for coming,” she says, squeezing Castiel’s shoulderblades. “Sorry I missed you earlier. Alex should be home soon for dinner. How are the boys?”

She means Sam and Dean. Castiel considers how to answer. “They’re doing as well as can be expected,” he says, truthfully, “under the circumstances.”

Jody lingers with her hands on his shoulders, smiling for some reason up at his face. “Yeah? How’s Dean?”

“He’s —”

Castiel thinks of what he saw in Dean’s mind. The atrocities Michael committed, yes, but more than that, Dean’s horror at them; the roiling tide of Dean’s fear. He thinks of Dean coming to him, and _asking,_ and of the last time they talked on the phone, and how proud Dean sounded when Castiel told him about Jack’s progress.

He thinks that he misses Dean.

Apparently Jody can tell.

“Dean is good,” Castiel says, and finds that he thinks it’s somewhat true.

When Alex gets home, she yells something unintelligible from the hallway that makes Claire roll her eyes, and runs upstairs to change out of her scrubs. She arrives in the dining room just as they’re all sitting down to eat, and Castiel lets Jody fill his plate along with all the others’, as Claire watches her hands.

“Do you even need to eat?” she asks, a few minutes later, around a mouthful of greens. She’s being deliberately rude, in a way that would make Castiel roll his eyes at Dean; he doesn’t rise to Claire’s bait. “I mean, what does this even _taste_ like to you?”

“It tastes like molecules,” Castiel answers, truthfully, after he finishes swallowing his own food. “But I have been getting better at mapping the connections between molecular composition and the subjective human experience of taste. I enjoy the challenge.”

Alex snorts, and Jody lets out a single, startled _ha_ of laughter. Even Patience has a smile tucked behind her cheeks. Claire pauses, fork hanging over her plate, and then rolls her eyes as if to say, _Whatever._

Castiel isn’t sure what he did right, or wrong, but he nods, placidly, and returns to eating his chicken.

\---

The bar in downtown Garretson is crowded, for all that it’s a Sunday.

Most people seem like they’re here to watch football; the Minnesota Vikings are playing a team with a giant “C” on their uniforms that is evidently supposed to represent a bear. The bar is topped with rippled old copper, and there’s a single seat free, on one end; Castiel hesitates, offering Claire the chance to take it.

“You go,” she says, loud in his ear to be heard over the noise of a rowdy group at a nearby table. “I’m gonna talk to them.”

Castiel follows the jerk of her chin to a high-walled booth in the far corner. It’s got a big circular table, and Castiel didn’t see it, when they first walked in. The patrons there are young, and far less energized than the rest of the crowd. They’re sitting close together, some arms over shoulders. Some of their faces are blotchy from crying.

“I’m surprised they’re out at a bar,” Castiel murmurs, “after what they’ve been through.”

Claire shrugs. “Local hangout spot. Probably the only warm place to be, this time of night, away from their parents.”

It _is_ warm inside, almost oppressively so. There’s a smell of stale beer in the air, and Castiel’s shoes stick slightly on the floor. “What are you going to tell them?”

She hesitates for only a moment. “That I’m Irene’s — friend from school. That I came to town the moment I heard.”

Castiel frowns. “Won’t they be suspicious of a friend they’ve never heard of?”

Claire gives him a pitying glance. “Not if she was in the closet,” she says, “and we were sleeping together.”

“Oh,” says Castiel. “Right.”

“You stay over here with the fogeys. I’ll be back,” says Claire, and pats his shoulder, bracingly, and makes for the other end of the bar.

Castiel sighs out a long breath, surveying his options. The spare seat at the end of the bar has already been taken. Its new occupant is giving his order to the bartender: a tall woman in her forties, with long dark hair piled around her head and a tight tank-top that shows off her slightly weathered skin. She waves something away from her face as she listens — a fly, no doubt attracted to the spilled beer and sticky floors — then nods, and looks up to point at Castiel. “Anything for you, honey?”

“I’ll have a double whiskey, neat,” says Castiel, because that’s what Dean would order.

“Comin’ right up,” she agrees, and returns a moment later, glass in hand.

Castiel takes it, and looks around for a place to sit. The bar is packed, and every last table is taken; most by large, noisy groups. Immediately behind him, though, at a low, square table sized for four, a middle-aged man sits alone.

He’s got a large beer gut, and a reddened look around his eyes, a vagueness to his movements that suggests he’s already drunk. When he catches Castiel’s eye, he gives a magnanimous nod, and beckons.

“Come on, then,” he declares, over-loud, “plenty o’ room.”

Castiel obeys, because he can’t see much of an alternative. The drunk pats his arm benevolently, then sits back in his chair with a groan.

He proceeds to spend forty-five minutes in a slurring stream-of-consciousness, educating Castiel on the finer points of things called names like “defensive fronts” and “three-techniques,” which is all apparently quite beyond Castiel’s Metatron-imparted codex of pop culture. Occasionally, he gestures excitedly at the screen, or jumps up shouting, but he never quite manages to knock over either of their drinks.

Castiel spends most of the lecture considering whether Dean knows this much about football. It seems like a thing that men who go to a lot of bars are invested in, and Dean is a man who goes to a lot of bars. Castiel’s never heard him talk about it, though, outside of passing references. Castiel’s never heard Dean get excited about any sports that weren’t wrestling. He cares far more about things like music, and movies.

Castiel files this information away for later reexamination. Somehow, despite having rebuilt him from nothing, despite having held his raw soul and willed it back into human form, Castiel never seems to tire of the puzzle that is Dean Winchester.

Occasionally, he cranes his head around to check on Claire. She looks like she’s doing well; she’s sitting at the large table now, too, apparently ingrained into the college students’ circle. She works her way through one beer, and starts another. Once, Castiel sees another girl put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, nodding, and Claire swallows visibly, looks down at her hands.

“‘Msorry t’ go on like this,” says the football rambler, jostling the table with his knee as he shifts in his chair. Beer slops from his glass. He looks down at it with a mournful look on his face. “‘Sjust, I’m usually here with my buddies. Harlow died last week, though, and Rod’s so brok’n up about it he didn’t wanna come out, and I’m — just. Here.”

He stares down at the spreading puddle of beer on the table. A fly has already arrived to take advantage of the opportunity. It takes Castiel a moment to understand what his drinking companion — he never learned the guy’s name — is telling him.

“Wait,” he says, sharply. “You were friends with Miles Harlow? The man who died?”

His friend nods glumly, dropping his chin. “Drank here ev’ry Sunday, since we were kids, almost. Us and Davies and Hausler, b’fore the war.”

Castiel’s pulse is racing. “And — this Hausler? Is he still around?”

His companion shakes his head miserably. “Ed died in Afghanistan. Broke ol’ Miles up somethin’ terrible. Still, I never thought he’d do something — somethin’ like —”

He breaks off, and digs a red bandana out of his breast pocket. He blows his nose into it noisily.

“Listen,” Castiel says, urgent. “Were you here, the night before he died? At this bar?”

Behind the bandana, his friend nods wetly.

But Castiel is already on his feet. He’s paid up; they need to get out of here. He catches Claire’s eye, meaningfully, and she gives a tiny shake of her head. Castiel narrows his gaze. _I mean it. Now,_ he tries to convey.

A minute later, she’s following him out into the parking lot, waving him away when he offers to take the keys, sliding into her driver’s seat. Only when both doors are closed — safe from prying ears — does she wheel on him and demand, “What was _that_ all about? They were starting to trust me.”

“It’s the bar,” says Castiel. “Both victims. They were here the night before they died. Before they dreamed. And they’d both lost someone.”

Claire’s still staring, not getting it.

“ _Claire._ You’ve been pretending to be the, the bereaved girlfriend of the last victim to die.”

Her mouth parts in a tiny _o._ Her hand comes up to touch a stray curl of her hair, unconscious. It stills.

“I need to fall asleep,” she says. “I need to see the dream.”

\---

Neil the djinn is smiling at him.

Dean tries to step back. He’s got a gun in his hand, but it feels like it’s made of rubber. No, he doesn’t; he’s got nothing. He's got a ring on his hand. Knuckles that don’t bleed, even when he uses them to crack glass.

 _Is this still part of the game?_ Neil asks.

 _No,_ Dean tries to say. _No, this isn’t real, it’s a nightmare, I can wake up._

_Oh, but I can bring nightmares into the world. Because of him. Because of you._

“No,” says Dean, and what’s standing in front of him is Cas.

Cas with his face bloody and his gaze still and dead. Cas swaying on his feet. And then Cas straightening, face clear, eyes hard; Cas saying _I’m sorry, Dean_ and reaching for his forehead and he’s rending Dean open, flaying every last corner of his shivering soul bare.

Dean’s eyes are filling with spots. He’s drowning. Cas’s voice is distant, receding: _I will save you, if you choose to deserve it._

Dean gasps for air, and chokes on his own saliva.

He rolls over in bed coughing. The room is brighter now, the moon’s light shafting directly in through the window where he didn’t bother to draw the curtains closed. It stains the floor silver.

Goddamnit. His hands are clenched to fists; that didn’t even happen. Nothing like that happened. That was Sam’s head Cas tore open, and anyway, it was long ago now — forgiven, forgotten.

His shoulders are steely with knotted pain. He pounds his fist into the mattress once, twice, as if that could discharge the pent-up tension. It doesn’t.

Cas doesn’t deserve to be fucking yanked into this shit in his head. Cas didn’t do anything wrong.

There’s a light-up alarm clock on the table by the bed. It reads, _2:19 AM._ Too early still to give up on sleeping. Too early to go make coffee and wait for the sun to rise.

A surge of primal, desperate misery wells up inside Dean’s chest. This is all he does; mark fucking time until something changes. Until there’s a hunt, something for him to _do._ Until Michael comes back to screw with their lives or take him, somehow, again.

He could go wake up Mom. Ask her for a fucking — hug. He almost laughs.

Plan B, then. He doesn’t like resorting to the fantasy; it feels dirty. Beyond the usual level of dirtiness for these things. Cas doesn’t deserve to be yanked into _this_ shit in his head, either.

But he can’t close his eyes and confront the picture of Cas, beaten and dying, or else Cas, cold and remote.

So he substitutes: Cas with his eyes wide and startled, with Dean’s fingers tangling his shirt buttons open. Dean’s hands dropping his tie to the floor. Cas with his chest bare and his nipples peaked with cold; Cas arching into his hand, making inarticulate noises of want, of revelation, while Dean murmurs praise into the rough stubble of his jaw.

Or — no. He shifts in bed, unable to get it quite right.

Cas slamming him back against a wall, mouth hot and sloppy on Dean’s. Cas seizing Dean’s hands when they try to go to work on his pants, and pinning them back. Cas sliding down Dean’s chest, rucking up his shirt, licking a hot stripe over his belly. Yanking down his pants. Cas with Dean deep in his throat, wet tight silk and perfect, Dean’s breath stuttering in time with his hips.

In Dean’s mind, he moves his hands from the places against the wall where Cas put them. He thinks Cas might object, but he doesn’t; just hums encouragement, vibrating all the way through his jaw, and Dean buries his fingers in his hair.

He can’t jerk off here. Not in this bed, not with Mom and Bobby only a thin wall away. But he presses the heel of his hand against his dick and thinks of Cas looking up at him, the shock of those eyes, half-lidded and heated with intent, and thinks that maybe, maybe the night’s not too long or too lonely to bear.

\---

Claire wants to knock back her seat then and there and fall asleep in the car. Castiel wants to drive back to Sioux Falls, to check in with Jody, to make sure they do this safely. In the end, they compromise by getting a motel room in town.

The clerk eyes them suspiciously as Castiel pays in cash. _She’s my daughter_ , he wants to say, but he holds his tongue.

Claire is jittery and wide-eyed, restless energy moving in her hands. Castiel has a growing suspicion that she won’t be able to fall asleep at all, riding this wave of anticipation, but she dismisses him.

“I can sleep anywhere,” she says, “watch,” and slides herself up the duvet to lean against the pillows without even kicking off her boots.

“I _will_ watch,” Castiel reminds her. “And if anything seems wrong, I’ll do what I can to wake you up. Including venturing into your thoughts, if I have to.”

Claire rolls her eyes. “Okay, _Dad,_ ” she says, as if there’s any possible way Castiel would take that as an insult, and settles her shoulders into the pillows, and closes her eyes.

She’s asleep in minutes, her boasting justified.

She’s still, though. Peaceful. Her hand curls against the pillow, and as Castiel watches, it twitches once or twice but doesn’t move.

Hours pass. Castiel watches Claire, the clock, the wall. Around 3am, his phone buzzes, and he takes it out: a text from Dean.

_You ever try a jigsaw puzzle? I feel like you’d like them. How’s Claire?_

Castiel smiles helplessly. _I have not,_ he types, _but if you say I’d like them, I imagine I would. Claire is —_

He stops. Deletes it. Claire is worrying him; Claire is grieving, and hunting something that tracks down grief. Maybe dark Kaia. Maybe — something else.

There are too many possibilities; imagining them makes his thoughts tangle with anxiety. It could be a dreamwalker. It could be an angel. It could be one of Michael’s monsters, a new breed.

He can’t tell Dean that. Dean feels guilty enough as it is.

And if it’s this other Kaia? He wonders if she’s anything like the Castiel he killed, in Apocalypse World — brutal, mindless, twisted. He wonders if she’s creeping into Claire’s thoughts right now.

He’s glad Dean didn’t have to meet that version of him. He wonders if Dean’s been doing jigsaw puzzles with his mother; if he should ask Dean about football.

 _Humans can be puzzles to me,_ he types, _and I like them quite well._

Claire is —

Claire is twitching on the bed, eyes flickering. She makes a soft noise. Her hand clenches on air.

It’s happening.

Castiel hits send, and drops the phone on the table. He lurches into the chair at Claire’s bedside, reaching for her forehead. He hovers there — hesitates — then presses, just a little, with his grace.

He can see glimpses of what’s happening in Claire’s dream. There’s a waterfall, somewhere, and a woman turning, glossy dark hair and an emerald scarf, but then — she’s shifting, and the scarf is gone, replaced by a chunky blue hoodie. Her hair is curling, massing around her cheeks, and her face is shifting, too, into something foxlike, wary, that hesitates before breaking into an immense smile.

Claire is smiling, too.

 _I didn’t know you were coming,_ says Kaia. _Isn’t it perfect here?_

The waterfall is gone. _Here_ is an open plain, wave after wave of grass, bleached golden with the fall; Claire’s station wagon is parked in the middle of everything, the middle of nothing. Kaia gestures at the sky; it’s sunset, somehow, colors splitting the horizon, but above them is deep, deep dark, and spangled with stars.

Kaia is sitting on the roof of the car, suddenly, and Claire beside her. One of them reaches, or maybe the other, and their fingers lace together, dark and light. Kaia points up with her free hand.

 _You can see it all, from here,_ _and none of it can hurt you._

It’s true, Castiel realizes. Shapes swim among the stars, like the quilt on Irene’s ceiling. Shimmers of aurora, rippling water, the breaching spout of a humpback whale. Mountains, valleys, empty beaches; the Sioux Falls dinner table, Jody presiding.

Jimmy and Amelia, soundless, her cheek pressed warm to his jaw, slow-dancing across a gleaming kitchen with silver appliances and white walls.

It makes something lurch in Castiel’s gut — seeing that look on a face he’s come to know as his own. That unadorned love; that awe, that gratitude. This is a Jimmy Novak who is where he wants to be; this is a Jimmy Novak who’s _home._

 _Why don’t you come to me?_ asks Kaia. _Come home._

Claire’s face is streaked with tears. _You’re dead,_ she says, into the fabric of the dream. _You’re not real._

Kaia smiles, slow and beautiful. _Of course I’m dead,_ she answers, and there’s a disarming humor to it, something like joy. _But I’m still real_. _They’re real._ Her chin tilts to Jimmy and Amelia, his hand smoothing now over her hair. _It’s all real._

 _No,_ says Claire, but it wavers.

 _Come to me,_ repeats Kaia. _You can do it. Any time you want. Come to me, and — do you remember what I said to you?_

Claire’s answer is a tiny thread of a voice, frayed nearly to nothing. _If you go, I’ll go with you._

 _So come,_ says Kaia, _come to me,_ and Claire’s crying, sobbing with all the depths of her soul, and Castiel _pulls._

He pulls her from the dream and into his arms, and she lurches into his chest, sobbing here, in real life, too. It’s noisy and desperate and whimpering, bubbles of snot escaping into Castiel’s shirt. He cradles her, arms tight around her back, and pours all the warmth of his grace, of his love, everything he can muster, through the core of her, praying, _we need you here, we need you here too,_ and thinking that he will —

He will kill this. Whatever it is. Whatever it is making Claire feel this way, he will take it in his hands and he will destroy it, piece by miserable piece.


	3. Chapter 3

When Dean next rolls over in bed and blinks himself awake, the sun is up and pouring light through the bedroom windows, and he’s been favored with a raging hard-on. He blinks away images of Cas naked, miles of skin, and holds a towel strategically in front of his crotch as he peers out the door, then makes his way to the bathroom.

There’s no sign of Mom or Bobby. A chill hovers around the windowpanes, but inside it’s warm and bright and still. Dean latches the bathroom door behind him and eyes the shower stall skeptically — it’s barely big enough for him to turn around.

Mom said she _thinks_ the hot water is working. Dean briefly considers the benefits of a cold shower. But when the spray comes out warm, he turns it up all the way to scalding, and steps inside and closes the door.

He jerks off with his eyes closed and water stinging at his shoulders, forearm braced against the wall. He feels a little as if he’s never been warm in his life, not until now. He tilts his head to let the spray massage his scalp, and thinks of his thumbs running circles over Cas’s.

It’s not real. Obviously. Though, he’s thought — a lot of times he’s thought —

Anyway. It shouldn’t hurt anything too badly, for a few minutes, to let himself pretend.

He emerges loose-limbed, a cloud of steam following him out the door. The living room and kitchen are still empty, but he hears Mom and Bobby’s bedroom door open, as he towels himself off again in his room; hears the bathroom door close, and the shower start again. His toe comes up against something smooth and hard on the floor, and he looks down: his phone. He must have knocked it off the bed, with all his thrashing last night.

When he tries to turn it on, the battery is dead. Dean finds his charger and plugs it into the wall, then goes to figure out coffee.

Mom appears as the final drops are hissing into the pot, hair up in a towel and eyes mascara-free. She touches Dean’s arm, a brief gesture of affection, and lets him pour her a cup. Then she wanders back over to the table and studies the puzzle. A few more sections are filled in, since Dean last looked at it. Mom follows his gaze and gives him a rueful smile.

“This isn’t a household that does a lot of sleeping through the night,” she admits.

Dean nods, throat suddenly tight. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Bobby said he heard you shout around one, but he was awake anyway.” Her eyes are careful on his face. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Nah.” Dean offers her a one-shoulder shrug, careful of spilling his coffee. “Nothing new.” He inclines his head toward the closed bedroom door. “Is Bobby —?”

“He’ll be out for a while. He usually gets up and putters for a few hours around 4, then sleeps late,” Mom says easily. “How soon do you need to be on the road?”

It’s a little after nine. “Not soon,” says Dean, honestly. He’s got nothing today but the eight hours home.

They work on the puzzle in companionable silence. It goes quickly, at this stage; there are some plain black pieces that need trial and error work to place, but there’s enough of a framework already that it’s easy, methodical. Bobby emerges after an hour or so, and helps them finish, and cooks up some bacon and eggs.

After breakfast, Bobby goes to split wood — he can do it mostly one-handed, he says, and it’s good for his shoulder to keep it moving — and Dean pulls on his heavy coat and takes his coffee and follows Mom out onto the dock.

It’s not as cold as he thought it would be. Last night’s wind has passed, and the sun is warm on his back, bright enough on the water that he has to squint. There are two big Adirondack chairs, a fresh-painted green, at the end of the dock. Dean settles into the one on the left when Mom takes the right.

It’s a floating dock, hinged to rise and fall with the lake, and the water sighs gently against the buoys keeping it afloat. In the distance, Dean hears a strain of engines from the highway, and the first rhythmic _crack-thump_ of Bobby’s ax falling, behind the house. There are no other sounds. No birds, no human voices.

Mom says, “You know your dad was the love of my life.”

Dean turns his head. She’s looking at him sidelong, running a finger over the chain that holds her wedding ring around her neck. As he watches, she pinches it lightly, loops it around the first joint of her ring finger, weaves it under the middle, over the index. The ring dangles, sparking in the sunlight, and bumps against her skin.

Dean’s heart is a cracked and concrete thing.

“Mom,” he says, low, “don’t. Don’t — apologize for being happy. Please.”

“I’m not.” She closes her eyes and breathes out, slowly, through her nose. “Or — I’m trying not to. I’m trying to say —”

She stops. The water ripples. A distant crow calls, once, and subsides.

“I remember,” Mom says, “what you said to me. When you saved me from the British Men of Letters.”

Shame stabs at Dean’s gut. “Mom, that’s not —”

“It _is_ important. And I just — I don’t know how to fix it. I _can’t_ fix it. Everything that happened to you. But I want you to know — my husband’s memory isn’t more important than my sons’ present. Than my sons’ _lives._ ”

Sunlight spears off the water, momentarily blinding, then ripples again, fades. Dean says, “Okay.”

“So if you ever want to talk about —”

“Mom.” Dean reaches, gently, for her hand. It takes her fingers a moment to recognize the gesture and untangle themselves from her necklace, but then she lets him squeeze them, lets him draw her hand down. “One thing at a time, okay?”

She smiles, a little watery. “Okay. I just — I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me. Not ever.”

Dean nods, dropping his head in acknowledgment. The planks below his boots are smooth and weathered, gouged and nicked in a few places, a physical memory of some other family’s time on this dock. He says, to change the subject, “Does Bobby make you happy?”

His mother drops her chin, too, and dimples. She looks suddenly shy. She says, “Yes.”

It surprises him into a laugh, brief and happy, loud on the water. By the time he’s done, she’s looking at him again. “Did you ever — have anyone? Or, want to?”

_Cas’s eyes, Cas’s jaw, Cas’s hands._

Dean swallows.

“There was, uh,” he says, voice rougher than he expects it to come out. “I spent — there was Lisa. And Ben. Her kid,” he adds quickly, because Mom’s eyes are widening in a different way. “I was with them for a year, after Sammy went to the Pit.”

There’s a long silence. Then Mom asks, “What happened?”, in a voice to break anyone’s heart.

“They’re okay.” He sees her startle. “I got — the life came back around for me, and I didn’t want them caught up in it. They’re doing good. Ben started college this year, U Chicago. Dumb kid puts everything on the internet.”

He’s never told anyone that. Not Sam, not Cas, not anybody.

 _I put a gun in his hands and I shouted in his face,_ he doesn’t say. _They’re better off now, not knowing my name._

“Do you ever think about going back?” Mom asks, softly.

Dean looks at his hands. He squints into the glare of the sun. He shakes his head.

“Do you ever think about — something? With another hunter, maybe, someone who understands the life?”

His mouth twitches in a sudden smile. He’s almost certain Sam’s said as much to him, in almost the same exact words. “Mom, if you’re gonna start playing matchmaker —”

She laughs at that, and raises her hands in surrender. “All right, all right. A mother can ask.”

 _Cas,_ sings the sun to his blood, echoes dancing on the water of the lake. _Cas,_ creak the planks of the dock. _Cas, Cas, Castiel,_ drums Bobby’s distant ax.

 _Cas_ shivers in the tremor of Dean’s hand. He’s had too much caffeine already.

“I should think about hitting the road,” he says, and offers his mom a hand up out of her chair.

\---

Castiel drives Claire’s car home to Sioux Falls as she sits in the passenger seat and stares out glassily into the night.

He parks it behind his own Yaris in the driveway, a recent acquisition. He half-carries Claire inside, her body drooping against his arm, and then picks her up for the journey up the steps to her room. It’s still shy of 5am; he turns the doorknob as quietly as he can, but after he deposits Claire in her own bed and drapes a blanket over her, he turns back to the doorway to find Jody illuminated in the hall light, pajama-clad, hair sticking up and face rumpled with sleep.

“Is she okay?” she whispers.

Castiel hesitates, then gestures for them to speak in the hall.

“I think so,” he says, in a low voice, when he’s closed the door to a crack behind him. “Whatever’s planting these dreams — it targeted her. She dreamed of Kaia. She was — upset by the experience.”

Jody sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Do you think it _is_ Kaia?”

Castiel pauses. The dream is still so real, tingling just beyond his fingertips. “It was — very vivid. But — whoever the dreamweaver is, whatever it is, they sent her a dream of Irene Kaur first. The last victim. Claire pretended to be her girlfriend, at the bar.”

Jody frowns. “So it wasn’t until it entered her subconscious that it knew to zero in on Kaia.”

“Yes.” Castiel swallows. “Which means —”

“We’re back to any of the patrons at the bar,” Jody sighs, “or anyone lurking around it.”

“I think we can rule out an angelic presence. I would have felt it.” That still leaves far more options than he would like.

Jody yawns widely, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve scheduled you guys for the coroner’s at ten — think she’s gonna make it?”

Castiel follows her gaze back inside the bedroom. The narrow shaft of hall light illuminates Claire’s ear, a few blonde curls. “I’ll watch over her. I can let you know.”

“All right, I’m going back to bed.” Jody pats his shoulder, briefly. “Thanks, Cas.”

It gives him a warm feeling somewhere in his chest, hearing her use his nickname. “Sleep well,” he says, and steps back into Claire’s room to sit, and watch, until morning.

\---

Claire sleeps through the morning rush of Patience getting ready for school and Jody and Alex getting ready for work. She sleeps through the stillness after, as the light through the curtains shifts and brightens, moving in panels across the wall. She sleeps until nine, and Castiel is just checking the time, thinking that he should ask Jody to reschedule the coroner’s appointment, when Claire’s phone starts buzzing across the nightstand by her bed.

She sits up in a heartbeat, eyes wide open as if they were never closed. Castiel’s on his feet; the phone is in Claire’s hand.

It buzzes again. She turns the screen to show him. Her eyes are wide and alert. “Unknown number,” she says.

Castiel’s heart twists. “Claire,” he says, “you don’t have to answer —”

He breaks off. She bites her lip, then raises the phone to her ear.

There’s crackling static on the other end; Castiel can’t make out a voice, anything that makes sense as words. But Claire’s jerking the phone from her ear, hanging up, thrusting it away from her. It lands with a clatter on the floor.

For a moment, they both stare at it. Castiel says, “Claire —”

“It was her,” says Claire. “It was Kaia.”

Castiel swallows. “Jody and I don’t think it’s actually Kaia,” he says, as gently as he can. “The way the dream manifested first as Irene —”

“I know.” Her voice is wooden, eyes fixed in front of her, and if she registers Castiel’s surprise, she doesn’t show it. “I mean — I think you’re right. I just — it _felt_ like her.”

His heart is breaking. “What did she say?”

“Same as before. _Come to me._ I couldn’t — I hung up before she said more.”

Castiel bends to pick up the phone. “If this case is too much for you —”

But she’s throwing the covers off, eyes flashing, to stand. She’s still wearing her clothes from last night. She holds out her hand for the phone, and after a moment, Castiel gives it to her.

“Did Jody make that coroner’s appointment?” Claire asks, checking her hair in the mirror.

“For 10am,” Castiel tells her. “If you need to reschedule —”

She spares him a fleeting glance, then shakes her head. “Just let me change, and we’ll go.”

\---

The bodies are still and gray on their tables. Castiel’s seen their faces more than once, now; Irene’s in living color, if in a dream. They look different, devoid of the hidden fire of their souls.

“Always glad to help you out, kid,” the coroner says, standing between the bodies, his hands braced casually on each table. Claire has him under the impression that she’s a local university student running a multi-year study of medical oddities and unusual deaths; apparently, the fiction doesn’t phase him. “You tell Jody I said hi.”

“Anything interesting about these ones?” Claire asks, circling the nearest body. Her face looks a little pale, but composed.

“Well.” The coroner scratches his chin. “They were found in that gorge, right? State park, big cliffs, popular place for jumping off ‘em? Up in Garretson. Everyone figured, they jumped and drowned, standard suicide.”

Claire raises her eyebrows. “But?”

The coroner taps his nose, smile growing. “ _But,_ that’s some cold water, this time of year.”

He’s clearly enjoying himself, drawing this out. Claire crosses her arms. “Get to the point, Beckett.”

Beckett sighs, raising his hands. “Fine. We looked at time of death — body temperature, rigor mortis, all that jazz. You’d expect them to cool down fast, in the cold.”

Claire raises her eyebrows in impatience.

“I’m explaining! Okay, so — you’d expect them to cool down fast. Body temperature puts time of death at only a few hours prior to discovery. Right, following? But rigor _mortis_ comes on _slower_ in the cold. And get this — both these bodies were in a far more advanced state of rigor mortis than their death in that river would explain.”

Castiel frowns. “So — they didn’t die by drowning.”

“Well, they _did._ ” Beckett flaps a hand equivocally. “But not in the river. Somewhere warm, hours beforehand. They only got dumped in that river later.”

Claire glances at Castiel over the bodies. The bar? It would be hard to murder someone, anywhere that crowded —

“Right,” says Claire, “we should get going.”

“Hang on, hang on,” says Beckett, hurrying around the table. “I’ve got one more thing to show you.” He pulls back the cloth covering Irene’s body, and points at a spot on the center of her chest, just below her collarbones. It takes Castiel a moment to understand what he’s looking at.

“See the bruising, there? Not a lot of people would notice that. Hell, I almost cut right through it, but then I thought, well hm, that little lady might be interested in this, mightn’t she?”

Claire draws closer. The bruise is in a subtle arc, thin and curved, a few inches long. It cuts symmetrically across the sternum. Beckett moves to Harlow’s body; he’s heavier, the bruise harder to make out, but it’s there.

“What causes that?” says Castiel.

Beckett laughs delightedly. He raises his hands to mime it: one, pressing down on the back of his skull, the other like a bar across his chest. “That, my dear sir, means your victims were drowned by force. My guess? In a toilet bowl.” He pauses, as if properly considering Castiel for the first time, and then looks at Claire. “By the way — who’s he?”

Castiel opens his mouth to reply. Claire elbows him.

Her hand is inside her jacket pocket, pressed flat, face pale. Her gaze meets Castiel’s, fleeting, urgent. “Gotta go, Beckett,” she says, and turns on her heel to hurry toward the door.

\---

Castiel catches up to Claire crouched in the sidewalk, holding her phone to her ear, face twisting with pain.

Her wrist jerks when she sees him, but then she pulls the phone away from her ear, presses the button for speakerphone. _Unknown Number,_ reads the screen. Claire says, “Kaia —”

Nothing. Just a static that Castiel can barely distinguish from the street noise.

After a moment, Claire lets her arms sag. She drops her face to her shoulder and says through her hair, in muffled tones, “She hung up.”

Castiel waits for a moment, then reaches to take the phone from Claire’s fingers. She yields it easily.

He presses and holds the power button, then swipes to turn it off.

Claire’s chin jerks up. Her eyes are watery. “What if she tells me where to go?”

Castiel shakes his head. “We’ll find another way,” he says. “Let’s head back to the house. I think it’s time to check in with Sam.”

\---

Dean smooths the bedspread down neatly, straightening the corners with military precision, the way Dad always taught them to do. Dad stopped doing it himself, after a while, but Dean never did; it makes things look right, somehow. Orderly. Even if everything else around them is a goddamned nightmare.

His phone is resurrected, a little light blinking sedately at one corner. He tugs the charger from the wall and shoves it into his bag before going to pocket the phone itself, briefly lighting up the screen to glance down for messages.

He stops. There’s one from Cas.

His own message must have gone through, sometime in the night — what did he say? Something dumb. About jigsaw puzzles. He closes his eyes, briefly, humiliation hot under his ribs, then opens them to read the reply.

_I have not, but if you say I’d like them, I imagine I would. Humans can be puzzles to me, and I like them quite well._

Dean sits down hard on the bed.

It makes no sense, no actual goddamn sense, what Cas does to him.

There’s a helpless smile on his face, something fond and giddy fizzing down his limbs. He feels like an idiot. He can’t quench the smile. He presses the phone against the line of his mouth, as if he could use it to iron away the evidence. But it just puts Cas’s words closer, somewhere tantalizing and intangible in the smooth of the screen against his lips. _I like them quite well._

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just Cas being Cas. But it only ever had to be just Cas being Cas, and Dean’s always been gone, kaput, dumbstruck. Fucking _twitterpated._

He finishes packing his bag, says his farewells to Mom and Bobby, bleeds out the lingering smile in the bounce of his step, in the crinkled lines around his eyes. He still thinks Mom’s going to call him on it, for a moment; she searches his face briefly before they hug, like she can’t quite add it up, but then she breaks into a smile of her own. It’s wide and unruly, tugging at the corners of her eyes, making them gleam. It’s the smile of someone who’s gone long enough without smiling — smiling properly, smiling like this — that she doesn’t quite know how to do it in moderation.

Dean folds her in his arms, tight, and she presses her forehead against his collarbone. “Thank you for coming,” she says, muffled, and he nods with his chin in her hair.

Then he takes his bag and starts the Impala and waves, once, peering past the windshield glare, fingers stiff as a salute. He reverses carefully over the roots, shifts into drive. He watches the house disappear in the rearview through the trunks of the pines.

At the top of the driveway, he hesitates.

Left will point him toward I-35. The quickest route to Kansas, Lebanon, the bunker. It’s a little before noon; he could be home around eight. By nine, easy.

Right will take him to Mankato. Where they found Kaia, the first time. Toward Route 60, I-90, Sioux Falls.

_If you say I’d like them, I imagine I would._

He can always change his mind. Cut it off; stay on 60 down to I-29. Make the run down the Missouri valley. It’s barely longer. It’s prettier country.

Dean turns the wheel, and lets Baby’s rumble drown the doubts from his mind.

 


	4. Chapter 4

“Hey, guys.” Sam sounds tired, and looks it, too. His eyelids are pink with exhaustion; the bunker’s kitchen sways dizzily behind him as he moves, and Castiel catches a glimpse of a coffee cup in the other hand. “What’s with the video call?”

“There’s been some hearing-voices going around,” Castiel explains. “We figure making sure we’re talking to the real Sam might be a good idea.”

Sam frowns, and sets his laptop down on the library table with a distinct clatter. For a moment, the screen only shows the plaid of his shirt; then he settles into view, face still serious. “What are you thinking — shifter?”

Castiel frowns; he hadn’t thought of that possibility. “We were actually working on a different line — this thing, whatever it is, also operates in dreams.”

“Huh.” Sam scratches his jaw. “What’s the story?”

Claire leans in; it’s her case to explain. “We’ve had a couple apparent suicides — drownings. Both victims had a dream the night before their death, of someone they’d lost, in some kind of paradise; at least one victim got a call the next day, from that person, before disappearing.”

Sam’s frown deepens. “You’re sure the phone call wasn’t a dream also?”

“Pretty sure.” Claire’s laugh sounds threadbare. “It’s happening to me too.”

A moment passes. Sam puts down his coffee.

“All right, I think you’d better tell me everything,” he says.

So they do: Irene and Melissa, the coroner, the bar, Miles Harlow, their original hypothesis about Kaia. Claire’s dream — she wordlessly looks for Castiel to tell it — and the two phone calls. “I was thinking,” Castiel says, “maybe another enhanced djinn, like the one you and Dean just encountered — one that can access dreams _and_ bring them into reality.”

Sam sighs heavily, running a hand over his face. “Right, but djinn are after blood, aren’t they? Were either of the victims exsanguinated?”

Castiel glances at Claire. Slowly, she shakes her head.

“I get why you were wondering about dark Kaia, but I agree that it doesn’t make sense,” Sam continues. “I mean, it’s hard to peg the motive. Is this thing feeding? Looking for revenge? Killing for sport?”

“The bodies didn’t have anything missing,” says Castiel. “Just — dead.”

“You could look at African dream root,” Sam suggests. “It’s not super common, but I guess theoretically, anyone — human, monster — could dreamwalk with it, if they had a bit of the victim’s DNA. A bar glass would work; we went up against a dream root user a while back, and he got Dean’s saliva off a beer bottle.”

“So, a shifter with dream root,” says Castiel, but Claire shakes her head.

“I palm silver all the time when I’m hunting,” she says, and shakes out her right wrist; an oversized charm bracelet dangles there. “Try to get skin whenever I shake someone’s hand, or pay a bartender, or brush past anyone in a crowd. I missed a few people, but — not a lot.”

Castiel raises his eyebrows, impressed. Sam closes his eyes briefly, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Okay, what about — oh.” His eyes fly open, and then they’re moving quickly, as if he’s minimizing the video window, scanning a webpage. “Claire — did Kaia say any specific phrases to you, anything repeated? In the dream, or on the phone?”

“‘If you go, I’ll go with you.’” Claire’s voice is soft; she’s avoiding both their eyes. “Oh, and, um — ‘Come to me.’”

“‘Come to me.’ There it is.” Sam sits back, triumphant. “I think you’re dealing with a crocotta.”

\---

Castiel has never heard of a crocotta. Neither has Claire.

“Scavenger, eats souls,” Sam rattles off, “mimics the voices of loved ones, often dead. Used to lure travelers off paths in the woods — now it uses phone calls, even computers sometimes. Video chat was a good idea.” He’s clicking busily. “Dean and I went up against one, like, ten years ago or more — haven’t seen one since. They’re rare. It would make a lot of sense to complement their powers with dream root.”

“How do we kill them?” asks Claire.

Sam’s eyes scan over the screen. “Impalement through the spine. Back of the neck is good. They don’t need anything fancy.”

“All right,” says Claire, “how do we track them down?”

“The one we met made its kills in a lot of places.” Sam frowns. “But they’ll have a central lair — a place they spend most of their time. They tend to live in filth. If you’ve been anywhere with lots of flies around —”

It’s not like it wasn’t the obvious answer. Claire and Castiel exchange glances.

Castiel says, “The bar.”

\---

Dean pulls off the highway at the first exit he sees with a handful of recognizably cheap motels on its sign, and makes for the one without a franchise logo. His hands are shaking, just a little, on the wheel.

He’s never had to motel it in Sioux Falls before; they always had Bobby, then Jody’s guest room. He doesn’t _have_ to motel it now. Hell, he doesn’t have to be here at all; he just —

He just wants to see Cas, without Sam or Jack or a dozen Apocalypse World hunters peering over their shoulders. Time was, Dean couldn’t fucking turn around in one of these beat-down old roadside motel rooms without Cas popping out of thin air behind him; maybe that’s why it feels appropriate. Maybe it’s that Cas always seems too damn guarded in the bunker, too wary of imposing, too intent on making himself useful. Which is Dean’s own fault, almost certainly, for sending the damn idiot away, but —

But.

Maybe it’s just that Dean’s too fucking scared to do this in his own home. To do this in any place that both of them can’t happily forget ever existed, if everything goes south.

He glances up at the sign: the massive _MOTEL_ in block capitals, white against brown. There’s a smaller, blue sign above it, the place’s actual name: _Cloud 9._

Dean groans out loud.

What the hell. He’s here; might as well play his hand. Baby’s door squeaks reassuringly as he opens it, and he pats his pockets: keys, wallet, phone.

It’s a little early for check-in, but the woman behind the desk spares him a bored glance and takes his card, taps rapidly on her keyboard, then slides a receipt across the desk for him to sign, along with an old-school metal key. Dean pockets it, hating and loving the weight of it in his hand. “Room 4,” she says, around her chewing gum, and turns back without further comment to her screen.

The room is simple, small, honestly a little nicer than his usual motel haunts. It has framed pictures in odd places on the two-tone walls, an old-fashioned tube TV on the dresser.

There’s only one bed.

Which makes perfect fucking sense, given that Dean was right there when the front desk lady asked “how many adults” and he said “one.” It doesn’t even matter; it’s not like Cas is _staying_ here, actually, it’s not like Cas _sleeps._ It still makes him want to laugh, a little hysterically, at the implications.

He’s going to call his best friend in the entire fucking universe — multiverse — and ask him to come meet him in a room with one bed so that Dean can find out if he also wants to mash their faces together, maybe, a bit. Or — other things.

Dean’s just — he’s carrying these smiles around in his pocket. Mom’s; his own. And he’s carrying Cas’s, too, that horrible night in the bunker, relief too fresh and fragile to be anything but performed, Michael’s clothes still toxic on his skin. Cas’s face, creased and helpless and happy, _knowing,_ eyes shining with something that’s real fucking hard to call anything but love.

Dean needs to — to see it again. To give it his full attention. To pick it apart and try to understand.

It’s not just that, though. It’s also —

He doesn’t think a guy who can look at him like that could fail to forgive him. If he’s got this all wrong. If his horniness and his neediness are just too tangled up together to let him see straight; if he’s about to vomit out his most desperately pathetic secret only to find it’s completely unrequited, entirely in his head.

Cas wouldn’t hate him for it. Not after everything. Dean’s given him more than enough reasons to hate him, over the years; plenty of reasons to leave. He’s still here.

Or, at least, in Sioux Falls. In Dean’s life. In the bunker, almost as often as not. And yeah, he’s still real fucking prone to vanishing off on wild goose chases, but when Dean’s being honest with himself, he gets why. Cas still feels like he has to solve everything. Like he has to prove his worth.

Maybe — maybe, _maybe_ — that’s Dean’s own fault. For not showing him, every chance he gets, that Cas is worth the fucking _world._

He palms his phone, taking a deep breath. Stares down at Cas’s contact, thumb hovering over the screen.

Cas will pick up, if he sees Dean calling.

And abruptly, Dean’s courage fails him. He can do this, but not — not in real time. Not with God-knows-who watching Cas react: Claire, Jody.

The motel phone, then. A voicemail, for Cas to listen to when he gets the chance. He picks it up. His fingers know the numbers, dial without hesitation.

Dean closes his eyes, and breathes, and listens to Cas’s phone ring.

\---

By light of day, the bar looks even dingier than it did last night. There’s a dirty pile of snow across one end of the parking lot, remnants of a recent storm. Claire pulls up to a far space, and shuts off the engine. She sits, for a moment, and stares through the glass.

There are arcs of gray-brown salt stains across its surface, tracing the paths of her windshield wipers. Castiel wonders if she’s ever properly washed this car; what Dean would have to say about it.

Claire says, “I’d like to go in alone.”

Castiel starts.

“I know what you’re gonna say. And I’m not trying to take unnecessary risks.” She isn’t looking at him. “But our monster is going to look human, and we don’t know any way to be _sure_ we’re impaling the right thing unless it tries to feed. I’m not gonna kill an innocent person, Cas.”

“That doesn’t mean —” Castiel starts, but he knows it’s a losing battle.

“It _does,_ though. It’s hunting me; it might not expect me to come looking, but it won’t be surprised, either. If there are two of us…”

She’s right. Castiel hates it.

“Pray to me,” he says, “and I’ll be there. The _minute_ you’re sure.”

Claire glances sharply at him. And he realizes: she hasn’t prayed to him, not even informally, in years. Not since they sent her to Jody’s. She’s as good as Dean is, in his way, at locking her feelings down.

“I will,” says Claire, softly, and shoulders her purse, and then she’s swinging out of the car and starting across the parking lot, booted steps crisp on the frozen gravel.

She makes it to the door, and tries the handle — locked. Castiel fumbles for his phone to check the time. The bar’s supposed to open at four; they’ve got a little less than an hour before any patrons should arrive.

Claire glances over her shoulder at the empty parking lot, then crouches to pick the lock.

It’s cold out, and her fingers must be stiff with it, but she makes quick work. A moment later, she’s dropping her picks back into her bag, straightening. She casts one last look around, then pulls the door open, and disappears inside.

It settles softly behind her.

Castiel sighs, plucking at a loose thread on his coat with anxiety. He glances down at his phone screen; he’ll give her — ten minutes? Fifteen? It’s 3:08 now, so —

He has a new missed call.

 _Unknown number,_ says the message on his screen. There’s a voicemail, 43 seconds long.

Castiel’s heart is beating fast. He hasn’t been targeted; there shouldn’t be any messages for him. But maybe — with Claire’s phone turned off —

He presses play, and lifts it to his ear.

But he’s only greeted by several seconds of silence. He frowns, pulling back the phone to check the screen — maybe it hasn’t started playing yet — then jerks it to his ear at the sound of Dean’s voice.

“ _Hey, uh — Cas,_ ” it says. There’s an odd quality to it, strained, like it hasn’t quite got Dean’s timbre right, his cadence. “ _Listen, man. I, uh — was in the area, Sioux Falls I mean, and I thought I’d stop by. To see you. I mean, um. I don’t want to mess up your visit with Claire, I just thought it would be —_ ”

The recording stops short. For a moment, Castiel thinks it’s over.

“ _Anyway, I’m in the — Cloud 9 Motel. Room 4. If you want to come by._ ” A quick intake of breath. Then, raw: “ _I miss you, man, I mean I_ really _miss you, and I just thought we should — talk. In private. If you want._ ”

The phone clicks. That’s all.

Castiel lowers his hand slowly, staring unseeing at the screen.

It’s not Dean. It can’t be Dean.

Dean wouldn’t drive all this way just to — see Castiel.

 _I was in the area,_ the voicemail said, but that’s a lie. Dean’s in Minnesota, visiting his mother, the better part of three hours away; or else he’s on his way back to the bunker. Sam would have mentioned it, if Dean were coming by Sioux Falls. Unless there’s something wrong —

But no. If there were, Dean would go directly to Jody’s house, or he’d call Castiel’s phone five times in immediate succession; he’d pray. He’d show up in Castiel’s Gas-n-Sip checkout line, grinning and untouchable, like why _wouldn’t_ he drop in unannounced with a case, after everything that’s happened, like Castiel should have been expecting him.

He wouldn’t leave hesitant voicemails that make Castiel’s insides twist with the urgent need to _go to him, now_.

Castiel frowns. The crocotta must have gotten to him somehow. He doesn’t dream; maybe it impinged on his mind anyway, used dream root to find its way into his waking consciousness, spied on his thoughts while he continued unaware. It must have learned Dean well enough to fake his voice, but not enough to do it _right._

It must have given up on Claire, and moved on to him.

But that means they have a lead. A far better one. Room 4, the Cloud 9 Motel. Sam said the crocotta he met spread its kills around; that makes sense. It wouldn’t be murdering people right in the bar. It’s too obvious.

He just has to get Claire, and they’ll go. He swings out of the passenger seat, slams the door behind him.

He’s halfway across the parking lot when her prayer hits: _CASTIEL!_

And Cas is running, dodging around the hood of another car as it pulls into the parking lot, slapping one hand against the headlight without turning to look at the driver. He’s wrenching the door open — still unlocked — and hurtling inside.

The bar is empty. He looks wildly around; a crash from the back hallway, by the bathrooms —

He slams through the door to the women’s stalls just in time to see the bartender, mouth gaping, jaw terrifyingly unhinged, with needle-like teeth thrusting up out of her gums, dragging Claire by her hair toward the toilet.

There’s a slice of blood across her cheek, eyes wide and wild. She’s speaking, somehow, through the mess that is her mouth, half-hissing — “ _your soul will taste so good going down, all that sorrow of first love — like that last girl, cinnamon and oranges —_ ”

“Claire!” Castiel shouts.

The bartender’s distorted face jerks up. She makes a shrieking, displeased hiss of a sound.

And Claire’s arm strikes blindly backward, knife still in hand.

Or, no — not blindly. Her blade scores a line across the crocotta’s hand, but that isn’t her aim. She buries it deep in the tangle of hair the crocotta has wrapped in its fist, jerks hard, and slices herself free.

And she’s on her feet, crouching, circling. Knives in both hands, like an extension of her body, animal. Her lips are smiling. Her eyes are alight.

“Say that to my face,” she says, and strikes.

There’s a flurry of motion, too fast for Castiel to help, too fast for him to follow. He has his angel blade in his hand, but this is all Claire now, slashing, punching, sweeping the crocotta’s legs out from under her. She goes crashing down, hard. The back of her head strikes the toilet seat, and she flounders, dazed.

It’s Claire who grabs her hair, this time; Claire who jerks her head back and sets the point of her knife against the monster’s exposed throat. The crocotta’s jaw is still working soundlessly, as if seeking, but her hands are limp at her sides.

“Oh my God,” says a voice at Castiel’s back.

He half-turns.

It’s Melissa Kaur.

Her face is pale, both hands raised to her mouth. She has a backpack on her shoulders; she’s wearing a different pleated skirt. Her eyes are round and huge.

“ _The little quilter,_ ” hisses the crocotta. Her breathing is labored; her voice comes in sputters. “ _Your sister loved your sky. I borrowed it, you know, for_ her _heaven._ ”

She means Claire’s. Castiel tightens his grip on his blade.

“ _I’d have loved,_ ” breathes the crocotta, “ _to have collected you._ ”

Melissa is shaking. Castiel takes a step forward, sheltering.

“Yeah,” says Claire, “shut up,” and rams her knife into the bartender’s throat, all the way through to her spine.

Blood stains the toilet bowl, running red down white porcelain, feathering into the water. Claire sits back abruptly among the shreds of hair on the tile, her hand bright with gore.

Castiel realizes Melissa’s fainting just in time to turn and catch her.

Claire looks up at the two of them, breathing hard, eyes considering. “I think you’d better lock the front door,” she says, “before any customers come in.”

\---

Melissa comes to only seconds later, blinking up at Castiel. “You’re not grief counselors,” she says, dazed. “Did I faint?”

Castiel frowns. “Yes. And you’re right; we’re hunters.”

“Who hunt…” Melissa’s neck cranes against his chest, and then, as she seems to realize she’s still reclining in his arms, she straightens. He keeps one hand on her shoulder, stabilizing. “Whatever that is.”

Claire’s using the sink to lever herself back up to her feet. She takes a look at her hair in the mirror, grimaces, then sticks her bloody hand under the faucet, turning it on. “Monsters,” she says, using her free hand to adjust her curls, brushing them back into an experimental ponytail. “Cas — the door?”

“Right.” Castiel squeezes Melissa’s shoulder, briefly. “Can you stand all right on your own?”

“I think so,” Melissa says, unmoving. Her eyes are on the bartender’s body. “I came here because I — knew Irene was here the night before she — I thought someone could help me understand…”

Her voice fades as the door swings shut again behind Castiel; one of its hinges squeals, wrenched off-kilter in the fight. He peers out the front door when he gets there; the parking lot is still empty except for Claire’s car and, now, Melissa’s. He turns the lock, and the bolt settles into place with a reassuring clunk.

Castiel pauses, turning his back to press against it. After a moment, he reaches into his pocket — pulls out the phone again.

There’s the voicemail. Taunting him. The crocotta’s dead, but he still feels an overwhelming need to touch his thumb to the screen where it’s waiting. To listen, again and again. To imagine a world where Dean might — might _want_ him like that, come seeking him with his heart raw and spilling from his throat like that —

It must have been a red herring; she knew they were close, needed to draw them away.

It won’t do any good to dwell on it. Castiel takes a deep breath, and swipes his finger across the screen. _Delete,_ he agrees.

A moment later, the bathroom door is squealing again, and he hastily pockets his phone. Claire emerges, leading the way, holding the door wide for Melissa; her hair is pulled tight in a high ponytail now, damage concealed. She waves a fly away from her face. “They’re all real,” she’s saying, “ghosts, monsters, werewolves — but there _are_ people out there hunting them. If that’s any comfort. I get it if it’s not.”

Melissa gives a shaky little laugh. “I actually — is it weird to say it is? Not that — it’s just easier to accept Irene being killed by a real-life monster than one in her own mind. That’s — so stupid, I know.”

Claire turns. She winces slightly at the motion; Castiel will have to check on her, heal her invisible wounds. “It’s not stupid. Just so long as you remember that real-life monsters’ favorite thing is to target the monsters that _do_ live in your mind. She did it to your sister; she did it to me, too.”

“That’s what makes a monster,” Castiel contributes, his voice hoarse. “Regardless of what their teeth look like.”

Claire meets his eyes. She’s wearing her familiar thick eyeliner today; Castiel finds something about it comforting. “Cas could make you forget. If you want to.”

Melissa swallows visibly. “I think I’d — rather not. If I get the deciding vote.”

Claire’s attention jerks back to her. She puts her hand on Melissa’s shoulder. “It’s your life. You get all the votes.” She smiles, abruptly, reaching into her bag. “Listen — if you ever need someone to talk about, about any of this — my mom’s a hunter too. Jody Mills; she’s the county sheriff. If you’re _ever_ in trouble — monsters or no monsters —”

“No offense,” Melissa interrupts, flushing, “but I’d — if it’d be okay — I think I’d rather call you.”

Claire stops dead.

“Never mind,” Melissa says, quickly, “it was dumb —”

“No, it’s —” Claire’s blushing now, too, but smiling, in a way Castiel doesn’t think is entirely controlled. “Look, here’s Jody’s card. And here’s one of mine.”

Melissa looks down at it. Her eyes widen, cheeks going even pinker. Then, she starts — improbably — to giggle.

“‘Miranda Priestly,’” she reads aloud, “‘Wildlife Officer’?”

Claire cuffs her briefly across the shoulder. “Hey, you’d be surprised. The more improbable the persona, the less people question it.” Her face softens. “But it’s Claire. Claire Novak.”

“Claire Novak. I’ll remember,” Melissa repeats. She glances at Castiel. “And — Cas?”

“Castiel,” he agrees, stepping forward to formally shake her hand.

She’s smiling. “You know, I’m kind of relieved you guys aren’t real grief counselors. You were _really shitty_ at it.”

Castiel looks down at the floor, then back up at her face. “I’m sorry. We _did_ try.”

“I know.” Melissa turns to Claire. “I should go. My mom will be wondering where I got to. Unless you need —” she pales slightly — “help cleaning up?”

Claire laughs outright. “We’ll be all right. Thanks for everything, Melissa.”

“Thanks, Claire,” says Melissa, softly, and she goes.

Castiel locks the door again behind her. “I’ll be there in a moment,” he calls after Claire, who’s already disappearing back down the hall to the bathroom. He pulls out his cell phone again, quickly; no new messages.

He just — needs to reach out to Dean. Say something. He failed to answer his question about Claire, earlier; now he types, quickly, _Claire is well. We just finished a hunt. I hope you had a good visit with your mother, and a safe drive back to Lebanon._

There; Dean will correct him if he’s actually in Sioux Falls. Which he isn’t. It was just a monster being a monster; just a cruel twist of the knife.

He tucks his phone away, and goes to help Claire dispose of a body.


	5. Chapter 5

Dean paces. He sits on the foot of the bed, crumpling the duvet; he turns on the TV, channel-surfs. Turns it off. Smooths out the bedspread, paces some more, scuffs his feet on the carpet.

The faucet in the bathroom sink is loose. He runs out to the Impala for a couple wrenches, opens up the vanity, fixes it. He checks his watch.

It’s been twenty-seven minutes.

How can time pass so slowly? He should have a drink. He shouldn’t have a drink; he doesn’t want Cas to think this confession is anything but clear-eyed, wholly intentional. That’s stupid; Dean spends half his life with a little whiskey holding the edge, and Cas knows it. He should have a drink anyway. He doesn’t.

Twenty-eight minutes, his watch tells him.

The machetes could use sharpening, maybe. Dean returns to the Impala’s trunk, sparing a glance around the parking lot in case he’s being observed. He tests each blade with his thumb; all honed to vamp-neck-slicing perfection. The guns are clean. He could put together some hex bags, maybe —

Cas is going to show up at the motel and see Dean’s room covered in witchcraft paraphernalia and think he’s actually lost his mind.

Jack needs some more fake IDs, Cas mentioned. Dean has headshots on his computer; he could work on that. But he’ll need to get them printed. He’ll need to go out somewhere. If Cas shows up —

Thirty-one minutes.

Dean goes back inside, and sits on the bed, his phone in his hands, and stares at the wall.

Minutes tick by. He doesn’t move. His insides are alive with tension, twisting and curling and stinging like static electricity. He sinks deep within the sensation. Rations Cas to himself in the smallest doses he can: the flutter of the muscle under his eyelid as he squints. The smooth curve of his thumbnail. The way his lips part when he’s confused. The subtle arch of his collarbone under the thick fabric of his coat —

His phone buzzes in his hands.

Dean starts, almost drops it.

The message is from Cas.

Abruptly, he doesn’t want to read it. He closes his eyes. Swallows. He’s not ready, not ready —

He can do this. Open his eyes. Read the answer, whatever it is. Rescue his stomach from this feeling of hovering on a precipice, the brink of free-fall —

His eyelids flicker, clench.

 _For Cas._ Maybe he’s on his way here now. Maybe Dean will sit here petrified for too long, and Cas won’t see a response, and he’ll doubt —

He opens his eyes.

 _Claire is well,_ Cas says. _We just finished a hunt. I hope you had a good visit with your mother, and a safe drive back to Lebanon._

It takes a long, incredulous moment for the throb of rejection to sink in.

Dean slides off the bed, down to the floor. He stares at the TV’s empty screen. It’s over; this long, pitiful charade he’s built for himself. It’s over. Cas wouldn’t want him like that. Cas couldn’t possibly want him like that. He’s been kindly ignoring Dean’s pathetic attraction all along, and now he’s telling him that he means to keep doing it. That they can pretend this never happened. Write it directly out of their memories, out of their lives.

Shit. _Fuck._

This was the whole point, wasn’t it? That he’d convinced himself he could _take_ Cas’s indifference. That even the death of the possibility wasn’t the end of the world.

Still. He’d expected — a chance to make his case, face to face —

What a stupid fucking thought to have. There’s no case to be made; Cas isn’t interested. Cas wants to spare him the agony of embarrassment. He’s just trying to be as kind, as quick and clean as he can.

Maybe Cas hasn’t checked his voicemails yet.

No; he’s not going down that road. Cas is trying to snuff out the flame of Dean’s hope as gently as he can, and Dean owes it to him not to question it. He owes it —

He owes it to himself to get a goddamn _drink._

The clerk looks surprised, then briefly suspicious, when he shows up to check out barely an hour after arriving. Apparently he doesn’t look like anyone who’s gotten lucky, though, because her face smooths to detached annoyance a moment later. “Something wrong with the room?”

“No,” Dean says, “I just need to — I need to go.”

“No refunds,” says the clerk, “unless —”

“That’s okay,” Dean interrupts, and ducks out the door, making a beeline for his car.

He’ll drive as long as he can before finding an anonymous roadside bar to get trashed at. Sleep it off in the Impala. Finish the drive when he can see straight again, when his head is still pounding and the lights are still blurring enough that he won’t be able to think about anything but keeping her between the lines.

Dean Winchester may be self-destructive, but hell, at least he’s organized about it.

He lowers his chin, flexes his fingers on the wheel, and turns her into the weak winter sunset. He doesn’t think about Cas. He drives.

\---

Jody and the other girls won’t be home until late — Alex has an evening EMT class, and Patience is studying at a friend’s house — and there’s plenty of leftovers for dinner, so Claire takes over the kitchen and declares to Castiel that she’s going to teach him to bake cookies.

He’s learned, over his last few visits, never to challenge Claire about anything to do with cooking. She and Alex share a certain kitchen illiteracy, born of their unconventional childhoods, but while Alex has undertaken a methodical campaign to learn the skills necessary to help Jody around the house, Claire is — most of the time — a defiant junk food devotee. She ruthlessly and reflexively mocks Patience’s interest in what she calls Rich Bitch Cooking ( _she made pizza with caramelized lemon slices and no tomato sauce, who does that — with homemade dough, like she’s too good for the crusts you buy at the store —_ ) and rolls her eyes so often at Alex’s reproductions of Jody’s mainstay dishes that it looks like a tic. When they’re all out of the house, though, the mood seems to occasionally seize her, and she moves through the kitchen like a tornado, fumbling through basic recipes on the back of boxes or packages, and more often than not destroying the evidence when she’s done.

Castiel feels privileged to be in on the secret. Not that it’s a secret, exactly — on the occasions Claire decides her efforts are acceptable for consumption, the others eat them while fighting down smiles, and don’t dare look each other in the eye — but Castiel is even more helpless in the kitchen than Claire is, and is therefore allowed to help her cook.

He finds himself, yet again, measuring Claire against Dean. They both grew up angrily self-sufficient teenagers — _your fault,_ Castiel reminds himself, duly, _she could have been baking cookies with her real father_ — but Dean had Sam to look after. Dean learned to conjure meals out of whatever they had, a certain fearless competence-by-necessity, to make sure his brother was fed.

Now that he has a real kitchen and stable funds, Dean seems to love cooking. Feeding the people in his family, at any rate. Left to his own devices, he tends to fall back on takeout and questionable leftovers. Pizza, diner food.

Castiel frowns. He remembers being human, and confronting the daily necessity of sustenance. Keeping himself going on Gas-n-Sip corn dogs and taquitos; craving a real burger, a _vegetable,_ anything that would leave his body feeling less run-down and degraded rather than more. He’s not sure why Claire would insist she prefers such things over home cooking, or why Dean would resort to them now that he has a kitchen of his own.

 _Cooking,_ he notes, next to _sports,_ on his mental list of things to puzzle out about Dean. Claire says, “ _Cas._ You’re supposed to be creaming those.”

Castiel looks down at the bowl. Two sticks of butter, half-smothered in piles of white and brown sugar. Claire must have set a wooden spoon by his hand at some point; he eyes it uncertainly. “What does that mean?”

Claire looks caught off guard. “Uh. Just kind of — smoosh them together I guess? Until they’re blended? That’s what I did last time and it seemed to work out all right.”

“I have absolute faith in your abilities,” Castiel tells her, prodding experimentally at the butter. He can use the back of the spoon, he realizes, to plaster it and the sugar together against the curve of the bowl. “I made the chicken soup you taught me for Jack, and he said it was delicious.”

“You did?” She looks over at him sharply, then quickly back down to the flour she’s measuring. Her chin works as if to say something else, but she doesn’t.

“He’s been feeling unwell. I thought soup would help.” And it did; Jack said it did, at any rate. He’s still been coughing, though. Castiel frowns, remembering the baby he took care of for an evening in Rexford, his absolute terror at her fever. Dean telling him it’s no big deal, kids get viruses all the time, to try a low dose of Tylenol.

There are moments, still, sometimes, when the fragility of human life seizes him with a paralyzing terror. It’s hard to tell when that fear is justified.

“He’s the one who brought you back, right?” says Claire, with studious disinterest. “When you — died?”

Castiel’s hand stills on the spoon.

“Yes,” he says.

“That’s good,” says Claire, still not looking at him. “I mean I’m — glad you came back.”

They’ve never really talked about it.

Castiel is alive again, when Jimmy and Amelia are not. When Kaia is not. He never knows what to do with that injustice; it can’t be defended, can’t be explained.

“Claire,” he says, as gently as he can, “I’m so —”

“I didn’t mourn you,” she interrupts, harsh.

Castiel closes his mouth.

“I’m not — some perfect little pretend daughter who, who’ll love you and miss you and always be — _nice._ ” Her voice is jagged glass. “I’m not — if that’s what you’re looking for, why you’re doing this — it’s not me.”

“I’m doing this,” says Castiel, “because you’re important. You’re important to me.”

Claire’s shoulders are shaking.

She ducks her chin, quickly, like she could hide her tears, then tips her face up, swipes a precise finger quickly beneath each of her eyes. “When Jody told me,” she says, eyes still high on the ceiling, “I felt — cold. I felt like — _oh, okay, I guess the part of me that feels things is dead._ Like — oh, that’s good to know.”

Castiel looks down into the bowl. He says, quietly, “And then Kaia.”

Claire laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “I figured — nothing could hurt me worse than my mom. That was how I explained it. I was so angry, for so long. And then, I just —” She swings abruptly, meeting his eyes. “Have you ever grieved someone? Really grieved someone?”

Sinking onto the library steps, alone. The bunker desolate, Jack and Sam in Lucifer’s grasp, Dean in Michael’s. Not knowing if any of them would ever come back. If he’d simply sit there until the Earth crumbled into dust, waiting. Always waiting.

And then: Sam and Jack returning, pain in the lines of their faces.

Dean gone.

“I don’t know,” Castiel says, honestly, hoarsely. “I — when I became human, everything felt greater. Sharper. I have grieved, but perhaps — perhaps not as humans grieve. I don’t _know._ ”

“It feels like,” says Claire, “the only thing you can think about is that you can’t keep feeling like this. That it’s too much. That it _has_ to get better, because if it doesn’t —”

She stops short.

 _Dean grieved you,_ Sam told Castiel once, a late night in the war room, deep in the interminable helplessness of Dean’s loss. _When you were gone. I mean, we both did, but — he took it_ hard.

“Does it?” he asks. “Get better?”

Claire glances up at him again, fleeting. She reaches for the baking soda, then pauses with it in her hand. “I don’t know. Yes and no. You — paper over it, you don’t feel it every day. But it’s still _there._ It doesn’t go away.”

A teaspoon; she scrapes it off on the cardboard flap, dumps it into the mixing bowl. A teaspoon of salt.

“And this,” she says, “I kept thinking. About how I was going to find the thing that killed her. Someday. When I got strong enough, and my family got strong enough, and we figured out a way to get back there. And now, to realize that the thing I’ve been looking for is _her,_ another version of her, I feel —”

She stops. Castiel’s gut twists. He feels, somehow, as if a great deal depends on the end of that sentence. “What?”

Her eyes are glittering when she smiles, tight and sharp. “Everything. I feel — _everything_ I could possibly feel. So I can’t —” A tiny, self-deprecating breath of a laugh. “I have to hunt. I have to — be brave, and take care of myself, and take care of the people I love. I can’t wallow in it, because if I do, there’ll be nothing of me left.”

Castiel looks down at his hand on the spoon. He resumes blending the butter and sugar together; he thinks he’s getting the hang of it. He tries to imagine life without Dean.

Not life without Dean because Michael has him, somewhere desperate and dangerous but not without hope of rescue. Not Dean vanishing under the weight of the Mark, or Dean exiling him from the bunker. Not even Dean in Hell, wild and spitting and his shoulder burning like a brand in Castiel’s grip, or Dean in Heaven, where Castiel could — go see him, maybe, he could find a way —

Dean, gone. Hopelessly. Irrevocably.

But he can’t.

It simply shies away from him, too monumental to grasp. He can’t. It’s too big, too final.

Castiel has always known his brain has its failings; that there are tasks it’s not wired to perform. He didn’t know there was anything too immense for it to hold.

“That’s probably good. You can add the vanilla and the eggs,” Claire says, pointing. “Do you know how to crack an egg?”

Castiel considers the question. “Probably not how I’m supposed to,” he admits.

“I’ll show you.” Claire moves to stand next to him, shows him how hard to strike it against the rim of the bowl, how to break the two halves and let the contents run out into the batter. “You’re maybe one of them,” she says, without meeting his eyes. “The people I love. Don’t expect me to be any _good_ at it. I just thought you should know.”

“Thank you,” says Castiel, gravely. _I love you. I love all of you,_ he thinks. “I will do my best to deserve it.”

\---

Dean gets home around 9am to find the bunker still and quiet. His head is pounding, pain forming a several-foot-thick concrete wall between him and his thoughts. His shoulders are sore and knotted from a night passed out across the Impala’s front bench, her leather sticking to his cheek; his right knee is throbbing again, and his mouth tastes foul. Exactly what the doctor ordered.

Still, he’s not made of stone. He drops his bag at the foot of his bed, grabs his dead guy robe from its hook on the wall, and heads for the shower.

He turns the water up to scalding, so hot it genuinely hurts to stand there with the droplets pebbling his back. He lets them drum at his neck, his shoulders, run in rivulets down his chest. For a long time, he simply stands there, still as a stone, watching his toes turn pink and stinging, letting himself go numb.

At last, he shakes himself out of his stupor and reaches for the soap. He washes his body down, as perfunctory as he can, but it still awakens something in him — an ache.

Reluctant, he fits his right hand around his dick, tries one stroke, two. _Boobs,_ he thinks; women, boobs, long nails making tracks in his skin —

His heart isn’t in it. And he’s not going to yield to the images he _wants_ to envision, no matter how breathlessly they press around him.

He’s feeling oddly at peace with it. Physical abjection has its advantages; the misery sits better in his stomach when accompanied by far too many questionable novelty shots. It’s right, that he should feel this shitty; it’s no less than he deserves.

It’s fucking contemptible, actually, that he ever thought he might be worth anything more. That he’s been selfish and short-sighted enough to _seek_ that feeling of detachment, a warm layer of booze protecting him from himself; that he would allow himself to be flooded, lose control, after what he let Michael do with his body —

Only fucking fitting, honestly. No one’s ever wanted Dean for anything but a tool. A warm body, a weapon, a one-night stand; it’s what he’s good for. He can pretend he’s better than that, play-act at being a, a _person,_ but Michael saw right through that lie. Michael treated him like the thing that he is: an instrument, weak and pointless without someone to _use_ him.

Cas is too good to want something like that. Someone like that.

Dean’s hands are shaking, his jaw clenched to shattering. He turns off the water. He strives to un-grind his teeth.

Sam’s room, when he passes it, has the door ajar, lights off inside. He must be up, or out. Dean does his best to smooth the self-loathing off his face, but when he turns the corner into the kitchen, it’s only Jack, eyes narrowed studiously as he pours an entire bakery’s worth of sugar into his coffee cup.

Which means there’s coffee. Something Dean can want; something to focus on. And there’s Jack, who’s bored and restless and inquisitive, stuck in the bunker by himself. Still with that cough; such a fucking _kid._

Suddenly, the dark riptide of Dean’s personal desolation feels selfish. Irrelevant. It fades like a radio signal, fuzzing out as his Baby crosses a rise. He never had anyone doing jigsaw puzzles with him, when he was little; that doesn’t mean Jack can’t. He slides into the seat across from him and says, “All right. What do you wanna do?”

Of course the kid wants to hunt.

And he’s baiting Dean, a little; Dean knows it. Pitting — dad against dad, _there’s_ a fucking picture, the three of them put together probably don’t even add up to one functional parent, but what the hell, they’re what Jack’s got. And when Jack talks about hunting with Cas — when his face lights up, voice glowing with achievement — Dean finds he can’t quite fight his own smile. Because it’s Cas, after everything. Cas, who came back from the Empty, for them; Cas who’s been raising _Lucifer’s child,_ believing in him, all along.

They’ll get past this. No matter how awkward Dean’s made it; Cas won’t stop being his friend.

He calls Sam to clear the plan, because no way he’s falling for the line Jack’s feeding him about going behind his brother’s back, though it’s pretty cute that the kid thinks he can try. Reminds him of Sam as a kid, honestly, always squirreling away lunch money and hiding soccer cleats under his bed and shrilling things like _Dad’s not here, Dean! He doesn’t need to know!_

“How was Mom?” asks Sam, and Dean tells him; then, “I dunno if you’ve heard from Cas at all. He’s up with Claire for a few more days sounds like, they’ve just been taking care of a crocotta outside Sioux Falls —”

It takes the words a moment to sink in. Dean’s grip tightens on the edge of the counter. “Crocotta, huh?” he asks, as casually as he can. “Been a while since we’ve run into one of those. They gank it yet?”

“Last night. Weird case, it was using dream root on top of its usual powers, but sounds like they made quick work once they figured it out.” Sam’s voice is proud. “Hey, you uh —”

But Jack is watching him impatiently, and Dean can’t have this revelation with a twofold audience. “Hey,” he interrupts, “Jack found a case, not far from here. Up in McCook, a body with human bite marks. Thought we’d go check it out.”

He’s caught his brother off balance. “Are you sure? Just you guys. I mean, we could probably send some other hunters out there, it’s so close —”

“Yeah, Sammy, we’re good,” says Dean, through a bite of his noodle taco. Noodle tacos; what a glorious invention. A gift from the gods. A perfect hangover cure. “You just take care of that hunt with Charlie, we’ll be —” another bite — “great.”

They’re great. They are fucking _great._

Cas didn’t reject him. Cas didn’t _know_ it was him. Cas thought his phone call — unknown number, he’s such an idiot — was from a fucking crocotta. _Cas thought a crocotta, of all the people in the world, would imitate Dean._

He needs to get this smile under control before Jack starts thinking he’s straight-up unhinged.

“Here we go,” he says. “Pack your stuff; we’re moving in thirty.”

Then he flees to his bedroom, buries his face in his pillow, and grins until the muscles of his cheeks are sore.

\---

 _Hey, you haven’t given Jack any kind of talk about the birds and the bees, have you?_ says Castiel’s phone, when he checks it the following afternoon.

They’re at a bowling alley. Claire slept until noon, and Castiel — didn’t sleep, exactly, but let himself drift. Jody had insisted on installing him on her couch, given her current lack of guest rooms, and while he doesn’t technically require a sleeping surface, he appreciates the gesture. It was nice, to lie there dreamily and listen to the low winter chatter of the birds in the bushes outside. To contemplate their vanished relations, flitting through the rainforests of Central America, preparing to return when the weather warms; to consider the ones who choose to stay.

After a while, his thoughts had turned, as they always do, to Dean. The wish he expresses sometimes for a vacation, a beach; the transitory life he’s led. The way he inhabits the bunker. The ways he’s been asking — it becomes more and more clear with every examination — for Castiel to call it home too.

Now, he squints at the text. He can’t recall if he’s discussed migration or hive dynamics with Jack in the past, and isn’t sure why Dean would ask. Maybe “the birds and the bees” is an idiom he’s unaware of; he could ask Claire when she returns from the bathroom. He pauses to query his inventory of pop culture knowledge;  _having_ it all doesn’t mean it isn’t clumsy to work with. But, ah — there.

The birds and the bees means sex.

Castiel blinks.

 _I have not,_ he types back, cautiously.  _Do you think it’s appropriate, at his age?_

The response comes an instant later.  _I dunno but it came up in this case we’re on and he’s asking._

Dean and Jack are working a case together.

Castiel pauses to process this information. A moment later, he finds himself smiling. Jack’s been craving more time with Dean; he hasn’t said as much, but it’s obvious. And Dean is the most competent caretaker Castiel knows. He’ll keep Jack safe. He’ll be able to tell, if the cough is something they should worry about.

 _I trust your judgment,_ he answers.

This time, the winking ellipsis persists for a while before Dean’s answer arrives.  _Dude, you should not trust my judgment. I had a screwed up childhood._

The ellipsis returns, for a moment, then vanishes again. Abruptly, Castiel’s heart hurts.

It’s a joke, of course. Something like a joke. But Dean  _did_ have a screwed up childhood, and Castiel’s list of things to ponder about it —  _sports, cooking_ — will never be complete. His understanding of Dean will never be complete.

He feels time running like sand through his fingers. He loves this man.

 _You raised Sam,_ he types.

 _Yeah well that kid had to be dragged kicking and screaming into even admitting he liked a girl. Jack’s over here asking our diner waitress if courting is what leads to sex._  

Castiel’s smiling, again, without meaning to.  _What did she tell him?_

_Sometimes you just have the sex._

Castiel laughs out loud, then looks up to see Claire reemerging from the bathroom. He tucks his phone back in his pocket and stands. He’s been working on his trash talk.

“Are you ready to be defeated?” he asks, seriously.

Claire stops dead. For a moment, she looks like she’s going to roll her eyes at him, then like she’s going to smile. “That’s some big talk, old man,” she drawls. “Let’s see if you can back it up.”

Trash talk: accomplished. Castiel reaches for the bowling ball — it’s a sparkly red swirl of a color, he’s not sure why — shuffles his feet in the unfamiliar shoes. He swings back his arm, darts forward a few steps, and lets it roll.

It goes directly into the gutter. Claire laughs out loud. Castiel shrugs, philosophically, and steps back to watch her take her turn.


	6. Chapter 6

Dean Winchester has read — a romance novel or two, in his day.

It’s not like it’s anything worth making a fuss about. He’s spent a hell of a lot of time in lonely motel rooms, and sometimes the TV signal cuts out from bad weather or his eyes hurt too much from staring at oncoming headlights or he just feels like reading a book. They’ll have a selection of battered paperbacks in the office, a lot of the time, and a lot of the time they’re romances, so — Dean’s familiar with the conventions of the genre, is all.

There’s something nice about stepping into a story at the beginning, and knowing you’re moving toward a tidy end. Monster movies, romance novels; it all adds up to the same. The jumbled late-night reruns on TV sometimes feel too much like his own life, discordant, going nowhere. A novel is a story you can hold in your hand.

He’d like, in some stiff-shouldered John Winchester part of himself, to insist that his life is nothing like a romance novel. That the romance came before he was born, and it ended in tragedy; there is no going back. The music died without him. The child is grown; the dream is gone.

But Mom is living in a little house by a lake with Bobby, and smiling wider than the ripples in the sun. Cas thought Dean was a crocotta. Jack is asking questions about love.

And Dean knows too much about romance novels to fool himself.

Sometimes, in romance novels, there’s love at first sight: a dashing rescue from a cruel villain. But others, there’s enmity, fear, even hate. There’s distrust. There are people who try to kill each other, people who are disarmed by each other, people who find in each other answers to questions they never knew how to pose. There are cosmic bonds, debts owed, resentments. _You should show me a little respect._

Sometimes, in romance novels, there’s friendship. Years of camaraderie, shared burdens, affection so close it’s almost familial. Sometimes there are painful attempts to do what’s best for the other, the choking down of inconvenient feelings. Sometimes there are characters so stupid about each other you want to knock their heads together.

Sometimes there’s death, and grief, and loss so acute it nearly extinguishes the world.

But sometimes that loss fades away like an illusion. Sometimes the only things standing between two characters are their old, familiar patterns, their miscommunications, their pride. Sometimes —

Sometimes, they have a kid to take care of, and it makes everything else a little more clear.

“And, that’s,” says Jack, “love.”

Dean can’t hide his smile. Can’t help thinking of the first time he ever saw Cas, sparks flying, shotguns firing, a demon knife buried in his chest.

“Actually, love can get crazier than that,” he admits. Then, remembering himself: “And it — might get crazier, with Harper still out there. But, uh. You did good, kid.”

Jack leans forward, mouth curving. “And?”

Dean’s not sure he likes the sound of that. “And what?”

“I was _right,_ ” Jack declares, sitting back, pleased with himself. “And you should be letting me go out on hunts.”

Dean holds back his laugh. He tries to put his serious dad face on; he tries to impart a lesson. Jack grins and throws it right back at him, which y’know what, is kind of fair; Dean concedes a point or two. Jack coughs.

“All right, tell you what,” Dean says. “When Sam gets back, we’ll talk to him about getting you out on more hunts. Okay? In the meantime, we’ll get you a crate of cough drops.”

Jack smiles, dismissive, almost proud of himself. “I’m _fine._ It’s all part of being human, right?”

Figures the kid would be delighted by even the shittiest parts of his own mortality.

Jack coughs, hunches over, coughs again.

Coughs harder.

The old familiar fear is there in Dean’s gut, cold, urgent. “You sure you’re okay?”

Jack opens his hand. He looks up, wondering. There’s blood in the heart of his palm.

“I — dunno,” he says.

And the world ends, again.

\---

Late that night, in the dark of Jody’s living room, Castiel skims back through his text messages.

The glare of his phone is an island of light, illuminating the blue of his tie, the plaid-patterned upholstery. Dean’s texts are a pantomime of tongue-in-cheek dismay: the horror of age at its eclipse by the lunacies of youth. _Cas, he told me I’m old. Cas, he thinks she’s in love with him. Cas, he hid in her bathroom and called me to ask for everything I know about sex._

Then, later: _Oh, you would not believe how fucked up this got. Chick is a necromancer playing kill-the-competition with her dead high school boyfriend named Vance._

_He has to eat people to stay together. Is that romantic?_

_Seriously, Vance?_

Castiel bites the inside of his smile. He could point out to Dean that he once had to eat other angels to stay with him; he won’t. It’s not a happy memory, and Dean seems happy. Cas is — happy, something like it — too.

His phone buzzes in his hands.

There have been times when Castiel has felt Dean’s longing tugging at him so strongly he reaches, unconscious, for his phone. Usually, he’s right; usually, Dean’s calling. He hasn’t always answered, but it’s always warmed something inside him, something guilty and elemental. Now, he feels — wonders, for an instant — if he’s done the opposite. If the strength of his wanting has called Dean, somehow, to him.

“Dean,” he says, smiling, raising the phone to his ear.

“Cas.” Dean’s voice is high and urgent, breaking. “You gotta — it’s Jack, something’s happened. You gotta get home, now.”

\---

Sam’s been back and watching Dean pace for two hours when Cas gets in. He comes up short in the hallway, coat flapping, eyes wild, and Dean can’t speak; points to Jack’s door and feels his throat tighten like he’s going to cry.

Cas goes in and closes the door behind him. Dean paces. Sam leans against the wall, urgently still.

“I did what I could,” says Cas, when he emerges. He meets Dean’s eyes. “But I don’t — I _don’t know_ what’s wrong with him.”

“But you can figure it out. Right?” Jack’s going to be okay; he _has_ to be okay. This isn’t like raising Sam was, Dad gone half the time, Dean against the world. He managed that. He can’t — with Cas in their corner, with everything they know now, with everything they _have_ — he can’t possibly fail at this.

There’s a crash from inside the room.

And they’re running, and Jack’s on the floor, seizing, foaming at the mouth. They’re carrying him to the Impala and Cas is sliding with him into the backseat, holding Jack upright, fingers tight on his shoulder; Sam is closing the door behind them, sliding into the front and saying, “drive, _drive,_ ” and Dean is, he will, if someone’s too slow to save Jack, it won’t be him. Only it has been him, already; he should have done this when the kid first collapsed, shouldn’t have waited on Cas or Sam, should’ve just _gone_ —

“Cop ahead,” says Sam, and Dean slows to 65. They’re past, and he opens her up.

It’s early morning in rural Kansas, but the ER is still, somehow, crowded. It takes Dean a minute to realize that — he’s set on getting to the desk. Getting Jack inside. Getting past this _snippy fucking intake lady,_ getting somebody with some kind of expertise —

“May 18th,” says Sam. “Date of birth. May 18th.”

And, okay, they’re doing this fucking thing. _What did you say your relationship is to the patient,_ like Dean hasn’t heard that one before, like it’s not a recipe for Child Protective Services and late-night escapes over state lines. “2000,” he says, doing the math — no, Jack needs to be over eighteen, he should be — “‘99 —” safe, shit, he had it right the first time. He shakes his head, corrects himself again: “2000.”

She wants to know family medical history. Father’s cause of death. _This is bullshit,_ Dean wants to say, but he falters.

“He was stabbed through the heart and he exploded,” supplies Cas.

This is getting away from them. “He’s sick,” Dean says. “His name is Jack Kline. His father exploded. There, you got all the basics, now what does he need to do to _see a doctor._ ”

The woman purses her lips.

Jack — who might actually compete with Sam for the title of smartest fucking kid Dean’s ever known — collapses in a heap on the floor.

\---

Hospitals, Dean thinks, through the steady distant rhythm of quiet beeps, unseen voices bouncing off linoleum floors, exist somewhere outside of time.

Dean knows what it’s like, outside time. He’s been to Heaven, been to Death’s reading room, spent forty years in Hell. He knows how the seconds stretch and the colors blur when you’re facing down the barrel of your own death; hell, he’s even hopped around a couple timelines, ducked into history and back again.

This isn’t like any of those times. This is worse.

He remembers sitting a vigil by a cold bed in a motel room in South Dakota. Staring at Sammy’s still face. Remembers hearing the seconds tick by on the clock and thinking they were mocking him, because time could go on but he couldn’t, he would be in this moment forever: comprehending over and over, in slow, unfolding fractals, the reality of his little brother’s corpse.

The year in a hellhound's shadow had been worth it. The forty years in the pit. Dean’s old enough now, weary enough of his own bullshit, to understand that maybe they shouldn’t have been; but they were. You can deal away as much of your life as you like, when the other option is nothing at all.

But he wouldn’t do it again.

Not for Jack, not for Sam. Not because their lives wouldn’t be worth his — they are, they always will be — but because he knows what it would do to them. He’s been there — owing his existence to an incomprehensible sacrifice. And he knows that there’s a Heaven waiting for them; that even without them, his own life would — horrifically, painstakingly — go on.

He clamps down, lock-jawed, on the sob that aches in his chest.

Sam is on the couch against the wall. He’s got his hand on one of the magazines on the table, as if he’d meant to open it, but isn’t sure how. His eyes are staring blankly at the cover. Cas is seated on the other couch, neck craned toward the room where Jack’s shrouded in masks and tubes and monitors.

Dean can’t sit. He can’t imagine sitting.

“Anyone want coffee?” he asks. There must be a place that sells coffee, somewhere in this hellhole. “Sam?”

His brother starts. “Nothing for me, thanks,” he says, in a pleasant, distant tone, as if approached by an anonymous waitress.

“Right,” says Dean, “I’ll be back.”

Cas stirs. “I’ll come with you.”

Cas doesn’t need to drink coffee. Never mind shitty hospital coffee. Dean hesitates, then says nothing as Cas rises, smoothing his trenchcoat down where it’s been crumpled as he sits. He squints down one corridor, then the other. “Which way, do you think?”

Dean has no fucking idea. “Let’s try that one,” he says, and then, “Sam? Sam. We’ll be back soon.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, looking up at last. “Yeah, of course. I’ll — be here.”

Right. Dean turns, and feels his knuckles brush the sleeve of Cas’s trenchcoat as they fall into step.

\---

It takes them several tries, and several different floors, to find an open cafeteria.

There’s a soup and coffee stand they pass twice, somehow, but it’s apparently closed. The second time, Dean stops to squint at the hours, checking his watch. They _should_ be open. Unless his watch is wrong. It’s nearly two in the afternoon; there’s no reason —

“Closed for Thanksgiving,” Cas says, pointing at another sign.

Dean blinks. “It’s Thanksgiving?”

“Tomorrow.”

He’s right. Huh. They try another staircase, find themselves at a caution-taped elevator. Turn left to attempt a pair of doors Dean’s not at all sure they’re supposed to be going through, and —

— there it is, a fluorescent-lit, buffet-trayed nirvana.

A handful of other patients or visitors are picking their way through the offerings. A woman in a long white coat and scrubs shoveling pineapple from a tray onto her plate. Another, in a flowing floral dress, eyeing the macaroni and cheese. They all look like they share Dean’s feeling that it could as easily be two in the morning. That’s okay; there’s a row of coffee dispensers along the far wall.

“Want anything to eat?” Dean asks, even though he knows it’s a stupid question. His own stomach is in knots. Cas gives him a look, and he shrugs, and leads the way to the coffee stand.

He takes a cup, and scans the offerings. Coffee; he just wants regular coffee. Not decaf, not vanilla, not hazelnut, not fucking pumpkin spice —

Jack would love that shit.

Has he ever tried it? Dean doesn’t know. For all he knows, a pumpkin spice latte would make Jack the happiest fucking kid on Earth, and they’ll never get to find out.

The cup is at risk of crumpling in his hand. He sets it down, and grips the edge of the counter, and drops his chin, and tries to breathe.

“Dean,” says Cas.

“I’m fine.” It’s automatic.

“Dean,” says Cas, again. He reaches to take the cup, then steps down the row of dispensers to the one on the far left. _Breakfast Blend,_ Dean sees, turning his head to watch; Cas pumps it once, twice, and steaming coffee splashes against white paper.

Cas sets it down. He reaches for a lid, and a sleeve, presses them carefully into place. When he turns to hand the cup back, Dean finds that he can straighten, and take it; their fingers brush.

“You’re — good at taking care of people,” Dean says, because he’s thinking it, and because it’s true.

“I learned from the best,” Cas answers gravely.

“Cas,” and it’s hammering out of his chest, it’s happening _right now,_ “it wasn’t the crocotta.”

Cas goes absolutely still.

“It was me. Just me.” His gut twists. “I’m sorry.”

For an instant, Cas’s hand twitches, as if he’d like to reach for Dean. He doesn’t. His lips are parted, eyes tense. “Why didn’t you —?”

\---

“‘Cause I was gonna tell you I love you,” says Dean, and reorders Castiel’s universe, again.

\---

“I mean that I’m,” he grates, “ _in_ love with you, I guess, and I get it if you don’t feel the same way, we don’t ever have to talk about it again. I just. I thought that’s what you meant, when you texted about Claire instead of answering —”

“It was the crocotta,” Cas breathes. “I thought it was the crocotta, luring us somewhere.”

“I figured that out,” Dean says, pressing on. He feels like _he’s_ made of paper. Like he could crumple or shiver or rend in two. “And I’m not — you don’t have to say anything. Now. Or you can tell me to drop it, and I will. I just. I know it’s the worst fucking time, with the kid —”

\---

Dean stops talking when Castiel reaches for the cup he placed, a moment ago, in his hand. He frees it gently, and sets it down on the counter. Dean’s hand hovers where he left it, empty, uncertain, so Castiel takes it in both of his. He looks down at the line of Dean’s knuckles — scabbed, as they often are, from his latest fight.

Castiel could smooth those scabs away. Knit tissue back together, smooth and good as new; ease any underlying aches or pains. He could do it with a brush of his thumb.

He doesn’t. He understands this, deep in his bones, better than by any right he should. He raises Dean’s hand to his lips, presses a careful kiss into his skin.

\---

“Do you like football?” Cas asks.

His voice is level and normal. His breath is warm, fingers strong, gaze intent on the back of Dean’s hand.

Where he just kissed him. Just — kissed him.

If Dean starts shaking now, he’ll be a fucking leaf in the wind. “What?"

Cas looks up. He’s smiling, and his eyes are blue. Dean feels the one against the ridge of his knuckles, and the other in the hidden corners of his soul.

“Never mind,” Cas says.

\---

He is so impossibly lovely, this man. He is so strong and shattered and bravely pieced together; there is so much love shining through the cracks in him. Castiel wants to smooth his hands over those fault lines and tell him, _I love this._ To touch the place at the corner of Dean’s eye where the laugh lines crinkle when he’s happy. _I love these._ To watch Dean’s gaze flicker under his eyelids as he believes, hesitates, believes.

 _I have always placed my faith in you, Dean Winchester,_ he thinks. _My faith, my trust, my love. All that I am. It has not always been safe in me; but it has been safe in you._

Dean looks away, toward his coffee cup, down. Castiel thinks of that same hesitation, calculation, on Dean’s face — a safehouse in an abandoned church, a sigil on the wall. Ishim’s threat, his own haze of pain, Dean’s choice. Like there was never any other.

He’s right. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the perfect time. The woman in the floral dress is staring at them, and the fluorescent light makes Dean's face sallow, shadowed, green-pale. There's still plenty that Castiel doesn’t understand. There are things he’ll never know.

“I love you,” he says, “and always have, and always will.”

\---

When Cas releases his hand, Dean can’t quite bear to let it fall. It ends up hooked in the collar of Cas’s shirt, a shock of warm skin. He closes his eyes. Doubt curdles on the word he has to ask.

“But?”

He feels Cas shake his head. There’s a little light stubble on his chin; it brushes the back of Dean’s hand. “No buts. Only ands.”

The fear is crushing in his chest. “Cas, if Jack —”

“He won’t. We’ll find a way.”

But that’s not true. There’s no guarantee. Cas doesn’t know that, not like Dean does — Cas hasn’t ever lost a kid.

Dean takes a deep breath. He settles his strength inside him, and opens his eyes.

“We should get back,” he says.

\---

Later, they’ll take turns standing vigil by the bed as they exhaust Jack’s options, one by one.

They’ll take him home after eleven hours at the hospital. Castiel will take off his trenchcoat, settle it over Jack’s shoulders, help Sam support him out the door as Dean makes their excuses to the attending physician. He’ll orbit close, then far again, go hunting a cure in a shaman’s trailer while Dean takes Jack on his — last, first — drive.

They’ll sit behind the wheels of separate cars, and beneath the shade of separate trees. _Time together,_ Jack will say, and Dean will think of Mom and Bobby, think of Cas, think _not enough,_ his damn family never gets to be a family enough. He’ll stand by Cas’s side and back his play and reach for him, first, when it seems like the spell has worked, it’s really worked, before covering his own face in relief.

Then, when everything’s gone wrong and worse than wrong, Castiel will find Dean waiting in the hallway outside the kitchen, face frightened or determined as the light falling on it shifts. He’ll take the lapels of Castiel’s trenchcoat and pull him close and kiss him like an offering, and Castiel will take it, _take it,_ with his hands hard on Dean’s hips and his mouth wide and messy, Dean gasping against him and a needy animal noise Castiel doesn’t recognize keening out of his own throat.

“I wasn’t sure if,” Dean will say later, when they fall apart, breathing hard, some wordlessly agreed cessation — _now isn’t the time to explain this to your brother._ “If you didn’t — only like chicks. That way.”

Cas will give him a look, heated and despairing.

They’ll lose everything — a child is everything — and it will be Dean that holds them together. Dean who puts his hand on Castiel’s arm and calls his mother and guides them, again and again, the hand on the tiller: _A wake. A bonfire._ When Castiel is at sea on his grief, remembering Claire’s words, trying to imagine how this would feel if he were truly human — it will be Dean who answers, not in words but in deeds. He’ll set Castiel tasks: driving the truck. Recalling which nougat bars were Jack’s favorite, and he’ll be right that Castiel knows. Finding more whiskey, when their supply runs short, and Castiel will understand something he never has before —

That being of service is Dean’s comfort. That sharing it with Cas is the greatest gift, the greatest solace he can offer.

Dean will catch Cas watching him, later, eyebrows drawn together, his face less lined and brittle than it was. He’ll understand the question, although he’s more than drunk enough to know he’ll slur the answer. “I gotta,” he’ll say, and point his hand forward, a vertical keel — _stay the course. Drink myself onto this table — or under it, if I have to._ There are thoughts that will creep in, if he doesn’t, crossroads-box type of thoughts. Wherever he is, whoever he’s with. He knows himself too well to blink.

Cas will clap a hand on his shoulder as he goes. “We did all we could, right?” Dean will ask the empty room.

They’ll turn tighter and tighter circles of having and losing. Castiel will stand in Kelly Kline’s heaven with his eyes on a face he does and doesn’t know, and he’ll grate out in a voice as terrible as the clenching in his gut — _Dean, I’m sorry, Dean —_ “Take me. Take me, in his stead. Take me.”

And the Empty will laugh and say, _oh, but I want you to suffer,_ and  _when you finally give yourself permission to be happy, and let the sun shine on your face —_

_That's when I'll come to drag you to nothing._

Jack will promise not to tell Sam and Dean, and Castiel will be glad. _They don’t need to know what happened here,_ he’ll say, and it will be kind, but it will also be selfish — the most selfish thing he’s ever done. Because he wants that happiness, that dream of the sun. He wants it in spite of the cost.

When Cas gets home that night, Dean will sit across from him at the kitchen table. He’ll watch Cas’s lips on the rim of his bottle and his hands steepling at his chin, watch the slow helpless smile whenever Jack speaks or laughs. _Michael, we’re going to get Michael,_ he’ll think, and then his body and spirit will be his own again, but in the meantime —

In the meantime, he’ll catch Cas by the sleeve on his way down the hall. He’ll pull Cas inside his room and kiss him up against the door, and he’ll sense an instant’s hesitation, a twinge of doubt, before Cas is surging for him, curving one hand around his hip and the other at the back of his neck, kissing Dean with an intensity that seems more-than-human. Like time has come unstuck again, only this time Cas is layering moment after moment on top of each other, kiss after kiss — all their lost past and uncertain future.

It will bring Dean to his knees, and he’ll stay there because he wants to. He’ll live out one fantasy after another, and it’ll be better, in real time — the sounds Cas makes, the color on his cheeks, the way his hands flutter and clutch and tighten with want and need. He’ll learn a few of Cas’s fantasies, too, be stripped bare and helpless by them, splayed out on his own bed, and afterward Cas will look up at him with his lips puffed and his eyes shining and say, “Thank you,” like Dean just did _him_ a favor.

Dean will laugh when Castiel replaces his clothes, one item at a time, after each of their encounters; smile when Castiel says he’s going to check on Jack. He’ll look painfully beautiful like that, flushed and naked and happy, relaxing in his own bedroom on his own memory foam mattress, and after a while Castiel will learn that he can come back to Dean like this once he’s completed his rounds. That a half-asleep Dean will turn over and burrow into Castiel’s shoulder, that he’ll sloppily kiss Castiel’s mouth and accuse him of stealing the Cookie Crunch, and then he’ll demand that he bring Dean some, too, and the decoder ring while he’s at it — _kid always gets that thing first._

It will be perfect, and more than perfect, and Castiel will be secretly grateful to the Empty, in some hidden corner of his heart. For planting the fear in him that lets him have this, for reminding him how easy it is to keep bliss at an arm’s length.

He’ll be too focused on avoiding his own eventual fate, when he should be worrying about Dean’s.

Dean, who keeps having vague, unfocused moments in the middle of conversations. Dean, whose thoughts revolve more and more tightly around Michael and the spear. Dean, whose freedom is so close he can taste it, which means he’s about to lose it all over again.

 _If you’re not gonna give it to me, kill me,_ he’ll tell Kaia, the spear to his chest.

 _He wouldn’t stop — squirming,_ Michael will say.

And he’ll be falling, falling, Cas’s name a disappearing memory on his lips. He’ll be somewhere else, a life where he can stay. A bar counter, a floor to sweep, customers to send on their way like cars from a shop; somewhere safe. Somewhere centered. Somewhere —

 _Cas_ —

And Castiel will understand, what he couldn’t before.

He was never at risk of the Empty, those stolen, golden nights. He won’t ever be whole while his family is broken and mending; won’t ever have joy when the people he loves know fear. If that’s what it takes — if there is some future where it’s the Empty’s time to come for him —

Tighter and tighter circles. Castiel’s face will be bloody, and his heartbeat heavy with hope.

He’ll think of Melissa and Irene, of Miles, of Claire. Of the crocotta, feasting on love turned to pain. He’ll think of the lives that come after death, and how many all of them have had. He’ll think: _It’s all right, if this ends someday for good. It’s all right. I’ll run toward it. The way is clear._

 _Cas,_ Dean will scream, in a voice not even he can hear.

And Castiel will clench his fist and abandon his fear, and go about chasing the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There it is! Thank you so much for reading, and happy new year!


End file.
